Sprint 1 Cultural
Christopher Alba's Blog
During my first year of engineering, I was faced with an ethical decision regarding if I should show my friend my working solution for a software problem. Showing him would have been unethical because it was a breach of the rules, and would endanger both our grades because we could fail if they found out my friend cheated off me. However, showing him would have fixed all his problems for that section and would have given him peace of mind. Some of the values involved in the ethical decision would be honesty, academic integrity, dependability and thoughtfulness. My final decision was to not show him the working solution because it was a breach of the rules and I was not comfortable in breaching rules set by the university. Doing so would have been dishonest and a breach of academic integrity. Also, I did not want to endanger both of our grades since if they found out he cheated from me we would both fail. This was an example of me being thoughtful and dependable. As a consequence of my decision, he spent the rest of the night trying to fix his code and probably endured more stress and felt very tired. Fortunately, he eventually managed to reach his own working solution after a few days. Most importantly, neither of us breached academic integrity and we were not at risk of failing the assessment.
Coming from a Filipino-Chinese background, my upbringing has surely had a great influence in how I handle ethical decisions. I was raised to follow the rules set by my family and to be respectful to others. This is why I was determined to not break any rules set by the university and to respect my friend by ensuring he does not fail the assessment. I try my best to be an honest person, who thinks about the wellbeing of others, like how I did for my friend. My strengths in terms of learning and career development would be persistence, resilience, patience, curiosity, perseverance, problem solving ability, and dedication. I display all these qualities when I am doing a coding project for university, more specifically for the paper COMPSYS202 in Computer Systems Engineering. There were many times where I endured struggle in my projects, but in most of them I managed to keep going and not give up. As a result, I ended up getting a 95% average grade for my projects and an 82% grade overall.
My limitations would be my poor social skills, comprehension and memory. In university, I rarely speak to anyone so my social experience is very limited. I also rarely go to parties and have very few friends that I regularly contact. My comprehension when it comes to reading posts on forums like stack overflow is limited because I struggle to understand a lot of what they are trying to say due to all the technical terms they use and very brief explanations. My memory is probably my weakest area, and it shows on all of the tests I have taken throughout my time in university. I know this because I spent one year doing Biomedical Science at the University of Auckland thinking that I somehow had excellent memory because of my excellent grades in high school. I ended up only getting a B average for that year which was around the average grade because I could not remember a lot of what I read from all the text books and lecture slides, and struggled to remember what was said in the lectures.
All of my strengths would help me in my learning journey because they will allow me to endure any struggle I might face in the future. When I encounter any learning obstacle, I will be able to eventually overcome it regardless of its nature because of my resilience, persistence, dedication, perseverance, patience and curiosity.
During one of my projects in ENGGEN121, we were tasked to design and build a small bridge made of popsicle sticks. During the final stage of the design process, one of our group members was tasked with calculating the load on each section of the bridge on excel. However, there was an in issue with his calculations that went undetected, which resulted in me having to redesign our bridge unnecessarily. A few hours after I had redesigned the bridge, he realized that there was an error in his calculations and that our analysis for the first design was incorrect. This lead to our design being flawed .Overall, in this project there was very little communication between the team members during the whole design and building process due to a lack of in person meetings. This consequently led to our bridge immediately collapsing on testing day. Essentially, I did not use any strategies to improve our communication at that time. Reflecting back, I would have insisted on us having more meetings to discuss and analyze our findings and design, and to collaborate and come up with a more resilient bridge design.