We had a great first meeting of the 2018-2019 UMass Create Student Fellows on Thursday, October 4. It was a rambling, exploratory session, appropriate to the work the Fellows will do, both on their own and together. We followed the agenda somewhat, but the questions and ideas kept us on our toes.
The Fellows wrote some of their initial goals for themselves:
What are your goals as Fellows?
As individuals?
- To learn more about the tools available for communication.
- To be able to teach others about my areas of interest.
- Refresh HTML, CSS, PHP, and SQL abilities.
- Explore options & resources.
- I’m not sure!
- Email options.
- Games!
As a group?
- To learn about each others’ topics.
- Brainstorm as a group in improve individual abilities.
- Incorporate new forms of media.
- Interactions between websites.
They also put forward some ideas about how they could get support while using UMass Create:
How are you going to get support?
- Talk to people.
- Look at what has been done in the past.
- Ask faculty!
- Stack Overflow.
- Look for the link “Documentation” for an application you’ve installed on cPanel.
What’s next?
Once they all request and start setting up their domains, that’s (for the most part) up to them. We’re really excited to see what they do together!
P.S. For any of the Student Fellows still reading, I’ll note something we didn’t discuss explicitly when we met:
Don’t feel pressured to invent projects to work on as a Fellow if you can build things on UMass Create that you could also get academic credit for!