First things first, my initial intentions of joining RadGrad was to get extra credit for ICS 314, straight-up. I thought nothing of it other than it being an extra credit opportunity which led me completing all the other steps for extra credit(except for the survey part where filled it out after the due date) and writing this essay. And you know what? I think that’s okay, sometimes in life you need a bit of incentive to push you to do something that can benefit you in the future.
Getting started with RadGrad was a rather painless process. After following the links on the ICS website, I landed at the RadGrad homepage. I was suprised to find out that RadGrad was integrated with our actual UH accounts, so we could log in using our UH credentials to gain access to the website instead going through a whole other process of filling personal information and signing up for the website. This was great for me as it reduced the amount of time I needed in my quest for extra credit.
As I began to follow the RadGrad tutorial, I started realizing that there was more to this website than just extra credit. Because of its integration with the UH system, RadGrad is able to take all the classes we’ve taken and lay it out much like how STAR would do it. It really is like another version of STAR that’s catered to the students in ICS and Computer Engineering departments. Like STAR, we are able to add classes to our student plans and generally plan the future of our “careers”. The reason I say career, is because not only are we able to add future classes, we’re also able to add future jobs or opportunities to our plan as a goal for us to go for.
The way that RadGrad is set up leads me to believe that it is eventually supposed to be a place where graduates from ICS and Computer Engineering can all come together and collaborate with each other. With RadGrad you can find other students who have similar interests and maybe one day in the future it may lead to something.
And that’s the thing about RadGrad, while it may not seem too useful now, in the future I can see it being a very useful tool for graduates who do want to collaborate with fellow alumni.