In the last week, we have been asked to submit the first draft of our formal report. I found that I learned a lot during researching, producing the formal proposal and peering review.

In this report, I chose a topic that is related to career life for UBC CS students. The computer science program in UBC mainly focuses on academic concepts, and however, IT industries require students to have more coding skills.

When I researched how to solve this conflict between our computer science education and industry needs, many universities’ computer-science education programs face the same challenge as UBC. The conceptual teaching education refers to the traditional lecture educations in many papers. This way of teaching has been widely discussed its drawbacks. The most common solution is to apply a modern teaching method in university courses. In computer-science education, many projected-based courses or collaborating practices with local industries are introduced into universities. Those papers give me some insights to help solve the conflict in UBC, and I found that applying previous knowledge to similar situations is helpful. These papers help me understand this problem in-depth, not only in how serious the conflict is but also in the pros and cons of the most common solution — projected-based courses.

The data collection part is tricky. I plan to provide surveys for both current UBC CS students and previous CS students. However, I receive few responses at the beginning of data collection. I try to contact my previous classmates and use social media like Facebook to connect with previous students in the CS program.

In peer review, I grouped with Yifan Wang. His report shares a similar topic with me. He is also worried about the CS students’ career life, and his solution is to let CSSS extends their functionality to help students better prepare for their career. In general, Yifan’s work is an outstanding report, and he clearly organized his report into many parts. One drawback in his report is that he did not mention much about his secondary data source. I recommended he include more content about how he analyzes his secondary data source and show the results.