Weekly Reflection: Senior Thesis Review

First of all, it is bittersweet that thesis has come to an end. Toward the end I did a lot of bonding with my fellow seniors as we scrambled to beat the clock and have everything working for our demos right before Friday’s showcase. So in the spirit of reflection, here’s what I have to say after almost a whole year researching and building “Turbo Pinball Ultra.” If Mike and I were to do this project over from the start, I would say that I most definitely would make sure the building process began much sooner than it did this spring. Along with that, time commitment would need to improve. We didn’t anticipate half of the setbacks that we encountered, and the 3–5am late nights the week of can be done without.

My advice for future IMM Seniors: don’t think you’re idea is going to work out perfectly. Prepare for things not going as planned, talk to your professors and classmates who may know a subject area better than you, and have fun with it. If you can keep it light hearted it will not be as soul crushing when everything falls apart 5 hours before showtime. During this project I learned some skills in Unity which is pretty sweet. Having never touched that software until 12 hours before the show when everything was crumbling was actually quite refreshing.

I further improved my fabrication and physical computing skills, hopefully one day I’ll have a concrete, enjoyable use for them. I learned during the showcase that you may encounter flaws that come out of interactions with your project. This is not the end of the world, and as long as you can be social and sell yourself you’ll have no problem captivating the audience still.

Future plans for our project as far as I am concerned are to get some decent photos of it working, then donate it to the department. If they don’t want it, I will gladly toss it over the IMM Balcony and repress it’s memory. That being said, I won’t repress the memories I have made with my classmates, or the great times Mike Martin and I had building the whole thing. Our “F**k it all” attitude mixed in with long nights and no sleep made it that much more fun to do, from the arguments over our music tastes to kicking back and watching 80s music videos on the projector to unwind when it got too stressful. Thanks for being a stand up project partner Mikey.