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Last week, we spent our weekends revising our paper from Chapters 1 to 5 and planned everything for the upcoming Oral Defense. Our Oral Defense is fast approaching, day by day we tend to overthink everything. If we happened to fail the Capstone Project Proposal, all the efforts and sleepless nights spent making our paper will be worthless.

This week was filled with fear as we contemplated the worst-case scenario. The multitude of "what-ifs" in our minds led to stress and overthinking. All of us sacrificed sleep in the remaining days, preparing rigorously for the fast-approaching Oral Defense. As a group, we meticulously planned to ensure thorough readiness and, of course, committed ourselves to doing our best in addressing all questions raised by the panels.

Today is Day 1 of our Oral Defense for the Capstone Project Proposal. It's a nerve-racking experience, and all of us are experiencing mixed emotions. Each group coming out of the room after delivering the verdict among the panels makes us feel nervous. However, after the verdict is announced, we tend to relax, knowing that none of the morning shift presenters failed, and hopefully, this trend continues until the last presenter of the day.

Before our scheduled time, we gather as a group to pray to God and seek His guidance. During the presentation, we ensure to keep ourselves relaxed for a smooth flow and to prevent mental blocks while enjoying the entire experience. After presenting our project, questions and clarifications are raised by the panels, and we are grateful for that because they provide us with ideas about how our system especially the diagrams should be.

After the Q and A session, we exited the room for feedback from the panels. We overthought too much due to the clarifications that we believed might be the reason for the project proposal to fail. Following the panels' feedback, Sir Gulfan called us in for the verdict. We were extremely anxious about the results, and when we heard the phrase "I regret to inform you," we thought we had failed the project proposal.

Thankfully, it was for a clout, and YES! We made it, and we are very grateful. Our era of overthinking has come to an end. All the efforts and sleepless nights we spent revising our papers have become fruitful. Above all, we thank God for everything and for the early Christmas gift we prayed for a long time ago. We are now going to welcome Christmas with happiness because our nerve-racking week for the Oral Defense has come to an end. Lastly, we are also grateful that all the Day 1 presenters passed the Capstone Project Proposal and are rooting for the Day 2 presenters tomorrow to pass as well.

Week 12:

Last week, due to the 5 days of Palakasan and 3 days Foundation Day, we were not able to update the Week 12 progress of our project. The continuous events have made us feel tired because most of us joined a contest and happy because we were able to participate physical activities that we don’t mostly do on a daily basis. The events were successful and for that, we are all grateful for the people behind the events that made it all possible.

              All fun and games but it is bound to come to an end. This week is the reality of all the due dates set for our tasks. We present our Capstone project to one of our subject and virtually met with Sir Gulfan for our final Capstone defense. He also instructed us on what to prepare and what to submit during and before the final defense. We will also gather as a group to prepare and discuss the things that will be needed for our final defense and for our project.

              This day (Thursday), we were about to present our login and the dashboard but most of the groups aren’t ready yet, thankfully, Ma’am Steph postponed the virtual meeting and gave us the chance to finish our project. There were problems faced during the creating of codes because the almost finish one got disappeared out of the blue due to the computer’s update. Luckily, one of the member, Clint, restored the codes.

              We are all nervous because our final oral defense is getting near. Day by day, we prepare ourselves for that day and make sure to really answer all of the what ifs and loopholes of our project. It is better to prepare because one mistake can really affect the whole presentation. All preparations aside, we also want to prepare ourselves for answering in straight English language. Speaking English and writing English is indeed a different task. In writing, we can still think of what we will write and erase it if we don’t like our inputs but in speaking, we can never undo it. The goal is to not focus too much on the grammar (but it’s a plus), but to focus on how we can relay the answers from the panelist in a manner that they can easily understand.

After the so-called "hell week", we are very grateful that we survived. All the sleepless nights we spent studying for all the upcoming quizzes, exams, orals, and laboratories has come to an end. The supposed schedule for our mock defense is postponed due to some reasons, we will not be able to do it onsite, but sir Gulfan said that we will be presenting it through a video presentation which will be submitted on or before the deadline which is this coming Friday, November 24.

The said video presentation was posted last week, and we as a group planned to do the video presentation during the weekend, since we are not so busy yet. And with that, we recorded the video presentation last Sunday night, in order for us to use our vacant time during the weekdays for the revisions of our Chapters 2-5 papers.

Supposedly this week's task is for the revisions of Chapters 2-5, however due to some reasons, we will not be able to start the revisions because it's not returned to us yet. We did think of revising the papers without the comments from sir Gulfan, but we are afraid to revise it since we don't know what would be the revisions we should do without it. We aren't sure about our revisions without the comments and suggestions. That's why we decided to wait for our Chapters 2-5 to return to us. And that's the time we will start the revisions, for us not to get disappointed for the time and efforts we will spend in revising the papers without the comments and suggestions from sir Gulfan.

The deadline for our final manuscript is fast approaching and so with our oral defense. Though next week is the most anticipated moment for the students which is called "Palakasan", we were in the middle of the happiness and sadness era. Of course we will enjoy this year’s Palakasan because it will only happen once a year, but the tasks that will be submitted after the Palakasan will always be at the back of our heads.

In college, taking a break is truly needed and we are grateful that in the next 5 days, we will be able to experience and witness physical activities that don’t usually happen in college. As a student comes with great responsibility but for now, we’ll let ourselves enjoy Palakasan in the next coming days.

Last week of October, Sir Gulfan gave us the Chapter 1 for revision. We reviewed our papers and are mindful of Sir Gulfan's comments. Before the academic break, we made sure to go library to, again, find basis for our project.

During the Academic Break, since it was holiday, we, as a group, are taking the break seriously. We set aside the school works to get ourselves some rest. 3 days before going back to school, we started revising the papers.

We were not really that sure with our Narrative Listing since we started our project with the new title but we made sure to analyze every step. Fast forward, the academic break was over, Sir Gulfan told us that he won't meet us last Tuesday since he was busy with meetings and will finalize the schedule for the mock defense.

This week has become bearable. But next week will be one of the weeks that we will always pray to succeed. We got to do our part as a student and that comes with multiple quizzes, exams, and oral recitation. Being a student is indeed challenging but we know that being an employee or even after graduating is the real challenge.

If Sir Gulfan finalizes the schedule for our mock defense to next week, then we will surely get ready and will do our best to answer each questions thrown during the mock defense. Third year in college has become so challenging and it'll really put us all to test. Everything will be fruitful soon. We are just grateful to our Lord for guiding us this far.

WEEK 9: TRIALS

The previous week, we interviewed the School Registrar once again on how they operate records relating the information of the students. It was definitely a calm and a little bit exhausting week since after the interview, Sir Gulfan posted our Chapters 4 and 5 tasks to achieve this week which the due date will be on Friday.  

Yesterday (Wednesday), our group together with the other groups received bad news. Sir Gulfan told us that other groups withdraw their client because the Lugait College is risky to take. We’re deeply saddened by the news because we pour our hearts out with this project and suddenly our work is just became useless. Although, we understand where Sir Gulfan’s concern is about, it’s just that the work we’ve done the past weeks has become useless somehow.

As our members went home for 2 days since we don’t have face-to-face classes, we cannot go to Sir Gulfan’s office for consultation. Fortunately, Sir Gulfan still manage to communicate to us via messenger. We discussed the potential clients and where can they be located. Our group were hesitating because he suggested places like Opol and Initao, which can be difficult on our part since the transportation is kinda expensive and we cannot go to our client if we need immediate response with our concern regarding our project.

God truly saw our struggles, disappointments, and sadness towards the news because Sir Gulfan arrived to the questions leading to the conclusion of us staying with our client. The work of the School Registrar is quite laborious. Sir Gulfan helped us that we should focus more on School Registrar’s work like making reports monthly, quarterly, yearly, and every semester and storing information about the student. More on monitoring the student’s record.

We are still thankful because even though we still need to start from scratch, we are able to stay with our client. Unlike other groups that they need to start looking for clients again and start from scratch. From Student’s Information System of Lugait College to Student’s Information Management System of Lugait College. This news may be sad and bad but we’re still doing our best to overcome these trials. We know we can do this, this is just bumps on the road.

On Monday, October 16, our team went to Lugait Municipal Hall for a follow-up interview with the school registrar of Lugait College. As our Capstone adviser mentioned, it is very important to communicate with our client for the development of our Capstone Project. Through communicating with our client during the development, it will help us to know more about how they run things, particularly with the Student Information System (SIS) that we are going to develop. Also, SIS is not a small system, follow-up interviews are necessary to avoid bigger problems in the future.

We gathered a lot of information about the process of the enrollment of the students as what the school registrar provided. Given that the school is not yet fully established, she advised us to observe or interview other established school or college to see the right processes on how they operate things. Even though the college is not yet fully established and is risky on our part, she did not hesitate to accommodate and share with us the information on how they operate things in their school.

The school registrar was very kind and gave us all the information we needed. With her approach, our team appreciated it so much since she did not hesitate to accommodate us despite her busy schedule and the need to prepare a lot of papers on the student's credentials. Though our interview took too much of her time, she did not make us feel a nuisance and yet did her best to answer all the questions we provided.

We are very grateful that our client is not that hard to see and is easy to talk to. We easily build a good relationship which is very important to avoid any misunderstanding that may arise in the future. Her approach is what we truly appreciate. It motivated us to know more and to start thinking deeply about our project.

In this week, we fully dedicated to continue working on chapter three. The complex details and concepts in this section have been both challenging. Each sentence is carefully crafted to ensure the clarity and coherence, creating a seamless flow of ideas for it. As we examine deeper about the chapter three, we find that there’s a lot of errors that needed to fix before the due date of the papers.

As the day progress we committed to maintaining a focused doing the chapter three. Like what programming tools we will used to create the project, that is why the three of us gather together to talk about it. When we finished discussing and analyzing about the tools, we put it inside that chapter three.

The deadline of submission was on Tuesday but fortunately, Sir Gulfan decided to move the deadline to Friday, which is a good thing so that we can finalize and edit our chapter 3. On Wednesday, the entire afternoon was spent for our Convocation and Orientation for the CMAS department. Sir Gulfan was also there and discussed the salary and the career path of choosing IT as your college course.

Finishing college with an IT degree is truly amazing because of its promising salary. Aside from that, it prepares us of the advanced world. Almost everything nowadays involves internet and gadgets. It’s indeed an advantage for us to learn at an early age how to maximize the use of internet and the gadget that we have.

To sum up our week, we were tasked to submit 2 chapters, Chapters 2 and 3. Although, we finished Chapter 2 on weekend, it’s still challenging on our part because we have to think thoroughly on what language to use and many more. We still visit the library from time to time to read and look for basis for our Capstone project.

This week's task is the submission of the Chapter 2 and Chapter 3 deliverables. As usual, we went to library again to check if what should be the content of the chapters. There are multiple Capstone paper from the former IT students available, but we chose the one that is brief and concise for our basis. In accordance with what sir Gulfan's advised, we should make sure that our paper's content is direct to the point as much as possible.

On Saturday, we gather in one place for us to collaborate with our ideas and to finish the Chapter 2, but we fail. Finding RRL and RRS is not an easy task, especially that we are given specific year range to follow. This is the most exciting part in making our paper because some of the interesting RRL and RRS were mostly a decade ago or more. However, there aren't many of the most recent Thesis Papers yet, so we didn't finish Chapter 2 over the weekend, while making sure to finish it on time or before the submission which is last Tuesday, September 26.

Thankfully, Sir Gulfan extended the submission of the two Chapters next week. This will give us some time to further discuss the content of each Chapter. Chapter 2 contains REVIEW OF RELATED LITERATURE AND SYSTEM, and Chapter 3 contains CONCEPTS, THEORIES AND TECHNICAL BACKGROUND. With the extension of the submission, we will make sure to put all the necessary information in a concise manner to avoid flowering words or unnecessary words. Being direct is important for the reader's POV.

Looking for RRL and RRS is quite a challenging, since most of the interesting RRL and RRS exist a decade ago which is not an acceptable year to be the basis of our project. Sir Gulfan advise us to for at least in 2018 and beyond which we find it difficult to look for. Though we spend all day on Saturday to look for RRL and RRS, we still can't make it and continued on Sunday. Thankfully, on Monday we are able to finish it the night before the submission day since we have classes during the daytime.

In conclusion, this week's goal is to finish the Chapter 2 and 3 on or before the deadline as much as possible, in order for us to manage and balance our time with our other subjects' task. To avoid cramming, we'll make sure to manage our time effectively. Since there are so many approaching activities, reports, long quizzes, laboratories, and etc. to be followed next week. We should set aside some time for us to study with our other subjects. While making sure that our Capstone Paper achieves its simplicity while giving also the necessary information for the Chapters 2 and 3.