Week 6 Learning Journal

PART 1- Our team—Savannah Kestral, Isaiah Suarez, Janaye Jackson, and I—came together over Discord to brainstorm potential capstone projects. We explored three high-impact ideas: developing a low-cost myoelectric prosthetic that improves muscle-signal accuracy and wearer comfort; designing an affordable, user-friendly smart-home security gateway to harden IoT devices against common vulnerabilities; and modeling greener data-center infrastructure to mitigate the environmental footprint of large-scale streaming and AI workloads. After individual deep dives and a class-wide vote, the myoelectric prosthetics concept was selected as our project, reflecting its strong alignment with our interests in embedded systems and machine learning.

Part 2 -This week’s career-guide materials deepened my understanding of both graduate school and internship preparation. I learned how to research specialized master’s programs—evaluating curriculum, faculty research areas, funding opportunities, and the balance between professional versus research orientations—and begun drafting personal statements that clearly connect my cybersecurity aspirations with my goal of teaching part-time at a community college. On the internship front, I discovered effective search strategies for paid, flexible opportunities (including micro-internships and remote roles), and picked up best practices for tailoring cover letters to highlight quantifiable achievements—like automating procurement tasks with Python—and soft skills such as team leadership from our Writing Lab. Finally, I reinforced techniques for crafting a results-driven resume and building a polished GitHub portfolio so that when it’s time to divide capstone responsibilities, we’ll be strong not only in our technical work but also in presenting our credentials to external reviewers and potential sponsors.

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