The First Graduates of Sheridan’s Mobile Computing Degree
This article transcribes a 2018 interview I had done with the first-ever graduates of Sheridan’s Mobile Computing program — aka The Pioneers of Mobile Computing. These are people who I consider as mentors and fellow-students who don’t realize how pivotal a role they played in helping me navigate my first year.
Alongside my classes at Sheridan, I joined the college’s radio team and by doing so, I was encouraged to interview students for the station. During the last week of their final semester, I asked Alex, Derek, and Mitch to join me in the studio — amidst exam season — to reflect on their time at Sheridan. Students from their cohort had taken one of the ultimate leaps of faith by being “first”. They played an important role in laying the groundwork for defining who a Mobile Computing student at Sheridan was, and ultimately there’s a lot of pressure in that. While they had no precise point of reference to what a person in this program could achieve, they had to become just that for many others.
Without further ado, here is our conversation — as best adapted for the written form.
How did you hear about this program and decide that it was the one for you?
Samina: My first question for you all is, how did you hear about the Mobile Computing program at Sheridan? Rewind four and a half years ago. How did you hear about it? And then how did you decide that this program — which at this point had no statistics of its own and no students to vouch for itself — was the one for you?
Derek: Well, in grade twelve, I was pretty into computer science already. It just so happened that I had another classmate, Blake, who was looking to go into a computer science program. So we sort of just applied to it together and we both got accepted. From there, I went to go see both of the head professors at the time — Magdin and Ed. I was kind of nervous because, during that session, I was the only student in the room. It was me, and my parents, and Magdin and Ed. They were explaining the program and just what we were going to be doing. They started by talking about mobile development, which really interested me.
Samina: So did the two professors really make an impression on you?
Derek: Yeah, they did. First, I didn’t know what to expect. Once they laid out what the program would consist of, I was pretty intrigued and excited to be accepted to it and start it.
Samina: When you were finding the program were you just browsing the web?
Derek: I was browsing a number of different colleges because unfortunately, I didn’t take the proper math to apply to any universities but happened upon this program and it was an Honors Bachelor’s program. Essentially the same length as the university program would be. And yeah, just really interesting.
Mitch: Well, my grade twelve computer science teacher told me that I shouldn’t pursue computer science, so I’m actually just in the process of proving them wrong. That’s all I’m really here for, to be completely honest! Ah, no, my dad heard about the program and he recommended it to me. I also came out just like Derek did, and I saw Ed. He showed me an app of Pokemon — it was really cool. Big Pokemon guy. What can I say? So that sold me right then and there. Obviously coming to Sheridan, especially at Oakville has its advantages. One, it’s kind of close to home so it was kind of a cost-saving effort for me. But also the program itself is way more hands-on. Ed was very clear about that. When you look at the syllabus of, for example, I got accepted into Brock computer science program and the courses and the syllabus were way more theoretical than the courses that were offered here. I was interested in coding and less about the science part of it. But this program definitely does a good job of covering both the theory and the practical.
Alex: For me, I had a teacher in high school that recommended for me to come to Sheridan and check out some of the programs within the college. Just by searching through the different degrees that Sheridan had, I came across the Mobile Computing one. So I came to the open house, where I met Ed and he spoke quite a bit about how there’s the mobile development within the program and how a lot of it’s going to be hands-on. So it really piqued my interest by that point.
How did you all meet each other?
Mitch: We’re the only cohort that actually didn’t have different classes. I think we did move from one semester, but we ended up in the same one. So we’ve literally spent the last five years fighting with — I mean, working with each other.
Samina: How has this support system helped?
Mitch: Things suck less when you’re doing it with friends. In a nutshell, yeah.
Samina: So I mean, you all took this leap of faith together. I would think that it only made your friendship even stronger cause you were experiencing the program in itself for the first time together.
Mitch: We’re pioneers and we definitely have had our fair shares of ups and the subsequent downs have been pretty low.
Derek: We definitely had a lot to talk about, just going through the same experiences. And yeah, that definitely helped strengthen our friendship and the various projects that we’ve struggled on together.
Mitch: I mean we’ve got a playful friendship, a banter, so to speak. But we also have a great work ethic. We work well together. We play to each other’s strengths. I think our friend group is associated partly around the way that we solve problems — and the way we solve problems complement each other’s problem-solving abilities.
Can you tell us about the structure of the Mobile Computing Program, and how the co-op process works?
Note: The structure of the program has since been changed from the time this interview took place
Samina: From what I know of right now, in your first and second year, you are a normal full-time student. Third-year comes around, and there’s a co-op — don’t know how that process works. Then after the third year, you go down a capstone or thesis route.
Mitch: The process is pretty straightforward. The co-op office goes out into the industry and the college has its relationships that it maintains with employers. The office posts jobs that Sheridan students can apply for on their jobs.Sheridan site. So as a co-op student, you apply, and the co-op office then relays your application to the actual company. The company reviews it and then forwards their yay or nay to the co-op office who then notifies you. So essentially you have a centralized place for applying to jobs, which is great. And obviously, the college has been around for a while, so it has some pretty strong relationships with places like RBC, CIBC, Scotiabank, TD. There are lots of little development firms in Oakville. There are development firms in Mississauga. And of course, there are tons of software shops in Toronto.
How did you prepare yourself for co-op?
Alex: So for my interviews, I come from a background of absolutely zero computer science or programming prior to coming into this program. So it was kind of nerve-wracking right off the start to just start applying to places and trying to do the whole big job hunt. So, when I actually landed an interview, I was kinda concerned right off the bat and was thinking like, OK, so what kind of questions are they going to ask me? But I went to the co-op office beforehand. And then with our old co-op advisor, we just ran through a whole bunch of different questions.
Samina: What type of questions?
Mitch: I think that they’re mostly behavioral.
Alex: Yeah. Correct. Predominantly they’re just behavioral questions.
Mitch: Well, the co-op term is short for cooperative education. So the employer is agreeing to give you real-world experience and they acknowledge the fact that you don’t have any when you start. So the interviews are not ultra-technical. Some of them are technical, but they’re not very complex in basic understanding, basic comprehension. They’re mostly behavioral. They really want to see if you’re gonna get along with the team.
Derek: In my first interview, I was asked a lot of behavioral questions first. But then they started asking some technical questions, such as what is the software development lifecycle? Just things developers should know. Very generic questions. And it did kind of help in my interview. But yeah, I think that mostly when you go for your first co-op, they don’t expect you to have a massive amount of experience. So they will ask you more behavioral questions, to begin with. So it is kind of nice going in not having to be worried about them grilling you into writing out a full algorithm right in front of them.
How did you adjust to your work term?
Derek: I adjusted pretty easily to my job. I had a really good team that I worked with, real close working in an agile space. So we are with each other all day. And even when we were working, we were just sort of having conversations and getting to know each other. And it just made me feel comfortable there because I didn’t know who I was working with during the first week. I was sort of siloed off sitting at a desk waiting to be assigned to a group. And I didn’t know what to expect from that. But once I was placed in my group, I just fit right in.
Alex: I got right into the development project right off the bat where they just gave me a list of things that I had to get accomplished. And we’re working on a small enough office between nine of us. So you start talking around and getting to know everyone around you. Pretty easily by two weeks, it was pretty much a standard work for me, just getting along with everyone.
Mitch: I think that as a group of people whose profession is mostly to sit in front of a computer screen all day, there is a definite emphasis on friendship in the workplace and not just logging eight hours in front of a screen and then going home and then going to bed. And you know, there’s got to be a little bit of fun in there. And so I think that comes from these people. These people are actively trying to be your friends. I think that’s part of the culture.
How did it feel like to come back to school after finishing your co-op term?
Mitch: We all had vastly different co-op experiences. So let me preface this by saying that our program has three separate but can-be-joined co-op sections. So the program has 12 months of co-op broken into three four-month sections. And I did three different co-op places. So every time I came back to school, I went back to a different co-op place. And to contrast that, Derek has been at the same place for the entire year. I was able to very quickly identify what I did and didn’t want to do at co-op. So I don’t want to shame anybody. But I knew that after the end of my first co-op that was maybe not the type of environment or the type of industry that I want to be working in anymore. And so I was eager actually to change industries to try something new, because, you know, it’s cool to identify what you want to do, but it’s equally useful identifying something that you don’t want to do. I worked in a very big monolithic organization for the first time, and I wasn’t very happy with the speed. The speed was too slow, which is great for some people. But I was looking for something a little more action-packed. And then I worked at a very small company and it was better, but still not quite what I was looking for. It’s a Goldilocks and the Three Bears type of deal where the company’s got to be not too big, but not too small. Got to be just right.
What kind of advice would you give to students applying to jobs? Any tips to stand out?
Mitch: So the first step in getting a co-op placement is getting the interview. And I think to do that, you’re totally right. Having a cool portfolio, a wow factor to your resume is going to intrigue them because you don’t have any work experience. Right? Like unless you have a really cool part-time job, you know? They’re looking for something in your resume that stands out from the rest of them. Part two is personality because you don’t have any work experience their not going to be looking for your technical knowledge. So once you do the interview, you just want to make sure that you’re prepared to kind of talk about yourself, be comfortable talking about yourself, and you want to be friendly. They’re not looking for somebody that’s technical, you know, knowledgeable about the project. Their expectation is to teach you. What they’re looking for is somebody who’s going to mesh well with the team.
Derek: Yeah, I agree with that. Especially in my experience at least, I didn’t know too much about the project on the business side. I knew how to program in C#, which is what the project was in. But I really had no idea what the app was truly doing in the background. But after two months or so, the business side just started coming to me and it was exponential learning after that, I just started to understand all the different terms.
What has your experience been like with Sheridan’s Centre for Mobile Innovation?
Mitch: The CMI stands for the Center for Mobile Innovation. So Ed Sykes namedropping was the program coordinator of our program before he left and made Magdin Stoica the program coordinator. And when he left, he went to a research position at the college. Ed’s had this kind of this dream for a while. I think it really started four years ago when he started facilitating research projects. And these research projects had a pretty straightforward formula. Ed would find somebody from the industry, mostly from health care, And what he would do is he would find somebody from industry that had a project that they wanted to research. Then he would find a team of students and he would find a professor liaison. And then he would help the professor apply for research funding. The research funding obviously helps fund the project but also helps the students. And this professor led student team works with the industry partner to facilitate the research project.
How did you get involved with CMI and what kind of things did you work on?
Derek: I was just contacted by my professors one day and they said we have research positions available. And at the time, being a broke student, it sounded like a good opportunity to make a little bit of money while I’m still in school. And our application mostly revolved around, again, health care. We were using a Raspberry Pi setup that you would be able to connect various health monitoring applications, such as a blood pressure monitor and ECG — different kinds of equipment. After that project was done, I didn’t take up another research position again because I was just too busy with school.
Samina: Do you get to choose what you want to be working on?
Mitch: Now the process is refined, you can apply. Part of the interview process, at least when I interviewed, was identifying why you wanted to. So they’re looking to see if you are a fit for the project, but they also want to make sure that the project is also a fit for you because they want to make sure that their catering to things that you’re interested in. And so the hiring process reflects that.
Other possible part-time opportunities student can take on is becoming a Peer Assisted Learning (PAL) Leader. Can you talk about what it means to be a PAL?
Samina: For those who don’t know, Sheridan has a peer-assisted learning program for courses that are historically difficult. Mitch was a PAL for one of the streams (the first year Programming Fundamentals course) and it was how I met him. Mitch, what made you want to be a PAL?
Mitch: I have a vested interest in this program, because if one group of people graduate from this program and nobody else, then, you know, if a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? I definitely wanted to help with the success of the program. And so I was asked to be a PAL. I was recommended to be one. And then I answered that request and I became a PAL because I wanted to help, but also because it seemed like a lot of fun. I don’t know if I like to teach, but I definitely like meeting people.
Entering your final year, how does the capstone and thesis routes look like?
Derek: A capstone is a project that represents the accumulation of the knowledge that you’ve gathered over the last four and a half years. It is a showcasing of your ability as a programmer, and it is a showcasing of what you’ve learned.
Samina: And what is a thesis?
Mitch: Like a thesis is at most professional institutions, it is essentially a very long research process, followed by an equally long research project that is finalized in a thesis defense. This is where you present the findings of your research and your thesis itself, and then thesis supervisors and the general public are invited to come in and question the thesis and check the validity of it.
Samina: What did you all choose?
Derek: We all chose capstone.
Samina: Why did you choose a capstone over a thesis?
Derek: I was more interested in just creating a project rather than writing a thesis about a topic. I didn’t have any ideas for a thesis. So just coming up with one and then making that my project for a year didn’t really sound appealing to me. But Alex and I, the semester before we were working on a project in the domain of landscaping and so we had our domain already. So we were just going to create a project in the same domain for our capstone. And I won’t talk about the Tim Cook thing yet, but that did have a big influence.
Mitch: I think, though, that we can all agree that the capstone and the thesis appeal to two different types of people.
Alex: For capstone, it is a project that you can put into your portfolio afterward. It’s something to talk about during interviews as well and say I created this full application within the given year and from there you can go into the full detail of what you’ve created and you can wow potential employers.
Mitch: And I think you can do the same thing with a thesis. It’s just a different type of wow.
Samina: Is there something that you can get out of a thesis that you can’t get out of capstone and vise versa?
Mitch: It was best explained to me in this way, a thesis is an extension of your learning at Sheridan. So you are going to become the master in something that you have not learned about. It’s gonna be new. Whereas, a capstone is mastering in a different sense. You are validating the last, you know, eight semesters or four years at the college.
Samina: Did you get to choose the tech stack you wanted to work with for your capstone?
Alex: What I thought would be my medium is Visual Studio and working with a platform of MVC from my co-op experience. That’s what I thought I was gonna be working on for my capstone. But it turned out, the capstone that Derek and I chose to go with required a different medium. That medium is Unity. If you don’t know, Unity is a game engine per se that you can be able to build 3D games and whatnot. And also augmented reality applications.
Samina: Did you have any experience in working with Unity before working on your capstone?
Alex: Absolutely none. Zero.
Samina: What happens after you finish your capstone?
Mitch: Just like a thesis defense, there is a capstone defense. So the goal of the capstone is to solve a real-world problem. And so you have to, you know, execute the capstone, solve the real-world problem and then defend the fact that you did or did not solve it.
Alex: Well, I’m going to go with a little bit of a different road here. I’m going to say that it’s not much of a defense. It is a celebration.
Derek: We are quoting some of our professors when we say that the capstone is not so much of a defense, it is a defense because you will be asked questions after you showcase your application and go through a demonstration of it. But it’s not so much of a defense that you’re defending your thesis topic. You are essentially just showcasing your application, showing off what you’ve done throughout the years, and presenting it to your class and professors. It is a little bit more laid back. I’m not as worried.
Mitch: But there is a panel of professors They ask questions and they’re not intentionally trying to make you look bad, but you have sunk an unimaginable amount of man-hours on something.
Derek: Almost 600 hours.
Mitch: It’s not enough just to have a string of use cases that are loosely strung together. It’s not like this thing opens bottles and opens windows. You know? You need to have a cohesive flow of use cases in this thing that you’ve made — it needs to have this flow, and it needs to solve a real problem. And I think that that’s more what they’re checking. They’re checking that you’re in tune with your capstone project and that you can identify the things that it does or does not do.
Derek: And also the feasibility, the adoption — whether or not people would effectively use your application in the end.
Mitch: There are targets that you have to hit in the capstone. One of them is a platform target. You need to have multiple platforms. So Alex and Derek left out that they have an AR application that runs on an iPad and the HoloLens. But to that point, our project also had to hit multiple targets. So we have an iPad application, we have an Android application with a little bit of IoT mixed in there, and a little Raspberry Pi application.
Derek: The other requirements for the capstone project included two areas of advanced computer science such as using IoT, using cloud computing, augmented reality, visualization, simulation & modeling, and big data analysis.
Mitch: So essentially you have this shelf of things that you need to have in your capstone and you have to pick a project that is going to best demonstrate these things. You only need to have two areas of advanced computer science, of which there are five. There are a few platforms. You could go the AR route, you go the iPad route. Some people use web platforms. Some of them have Node.js applications. There are so many web platforms and various cloud platforms. So there are all these kinds of components and you have to kind of blend them all so that they work cohesively.
What was it like meeting Tim Cook?
Samina: Tim Cook is the CEO of Apple. He took over when Steve Jobs had passed away. Mobile Computing’s first cohort of graduates, were the only ones who got a chance to meet him during his visit to Sheridan. How did you find out you were meeting Tim Cook and how did it go?
Mitch: We all found out we were meeting Tim Cook when he turned the corner.
Derek: We were told a special guest was coming. We had some ideas of who it could be. But that night we did realize that there had been news articles showing that Tim Cook was doing rounds in Toronto promoting Swift for education and was on tour. Swift is the iOS programming language. The first iOS programming was Objective-C but then from there, it transitioned to a more modern version — Swift. Anyways, we were told a special guest was coming and we had some insight. I didn’t believe it for a second. We had an early 8:00 AM class the next day but had to arrive about an hour early though it was nice because they had free refreshments and had breakfast for us. And then our jaws dropped as soon as we realized who walked in the room and we were all just ecstatic.
Alex: So he walked into the room at that point and the first thing he asked was what’s wrong with Swift and how can we improve it?
Mitch: He is a very down-to-earth guy.
Alex: Derek and I had an interesting conversation with Tim Cook. So he came over and he asked us what kind of projects we were working on. And of course, this was at the start of our capstone project. So Derek and I were just kind of looking into areas in how we can improve what our current capstone idea was.
Derek: Like I said, we were in the domain of landscaping, so we were trying to create a management application for my parents’ landscaping company.
Alex: But it just wasn’t as robust as what Derek and I needed because we were needing an advanced area of computer science. We were thinking about what we could do with AR. So like Tim Cook comes up to us and we start talking about it. We brought up the idea of AR and he goes, “Well, why don’t you start working on a design application per se, which you can build to visualize plants using AR? I don’t think anybody’s done that yet.” And we’re like, we know what we’re doing.
Mitch: Tim Cook told me that they try to make Swift as simple as all their products, which simplicity is a big, big theme in computer science. And for me, hearing Mr. Cook say that — it reiterated the importance to me. You know, a professor gets up in the front of the class, and may talk about opportunities for things to be simple, but if you’re in class, it’s a lecture. You take the notes. But to hear somebody of that magnitude say that, you know, from the devices that Apple makes to the software language that they’ve designed. They want everything to be simple and it’s very important. And hearing him say that reiterated its importance for me.
What parting advice would you have for students in this program, or students in general?
Alex: My advice is to get a good squad together.
Derek: My advice would be that if it ever gets too hard or you’re struggling a lot in your classes and you just really see like there’s no way you can do all this. Honestly, just keep going at that point. Things do get better, but it just might take a while for them to get better. But I mean, if I had said that to myself two years ago, I probably would have punched myself in the face. But I think I’m pretty good right now.
Mitch: I’ve made great friendships here and I’m grateful for that. Ultimately, the friendships I’ve made at Sheridan are forged not under normal circumstances, they are forged under an incredible amount of stress. They’re forged under so often what seems like insurmountable odds. My point is, is that I think that to Derek’s point, the going is going to get tough. There’s no doubt about that. This is not it’s not going to be a cakewalk, period. It’s going to get hard. To Alex’s point, Teamwork makes the dream work. I just think that having a good team dynamic and having friends that you can count on is ultimately the best thing that you can do for yourself while here at Sheridan.
