The first time I heard about radgrad was from an email I got after I took ICS 111 notifying me about how I should do things to gain more experience coding. I honestly didn’t know what that ment or how I was supposed to gain more experience. Where was I supposed to go to gain more “experience”. So…I just ignored it. I’m actually a math major, so I figured it doesnt apply to me. It’s kind of shocking how much it has changed since then. Now it seems like a more cohesive idea that actually could be useful in planning out my classes.
Signing into radgrad was painless and I was immediately greated by a bunch of high priority tasks. The interests section was ok, I didn’t really see anything that caught my eye, again, since I’m not an ICS major, this is probably not surprising. But what really impressed me was the career goals and courses. The career goals opened my eyes to the multitude of posibilities that ICS is capable of. Many of these career paths were unknown to me till that moment. I actually found a decent ammount of careers that I wouldn’t mind exploring better. Courses was also an eye opener. The courses page didn’t just give a list of courses, it also gave a good description of the course and how said course could benefit me along my degree path. I also found a good ammount of classes that if time allows, I wouldn’t mind taking. I would say the most surprising class to me, was the 400 level ICS psychology course. I’m honestly curious how those two ideas can complement each other. They seem like two totally different ideas. Opportunities was also interesting, I found a few things I wouldn’t mind trying out/learning.
I think radgrad has improved so much over the few years. I can see how radgrad would be very helpful for students trying to piece together their class schedule. It offers class information, how said class can help them fufill their goals and it gives students a place to find oppertunities to expand their experience in coding. It really cuts down on the confusion and uncertainty associated with class registration. I wish this was a thing that all schools had implemented a while ago. It would have helped me decide on my goal a lot sooner. Not knowing what I can use my degree for was a big contributing factor to my uncertainty in college.