Manoa Study Abroad Central

Manoa Study Abroad Central is an application that I developed with my team members. It is a digital platform dedicated to simplifying the process of choosing a study abroad or exchange program at UH Manoa. UHM has several study abroad and exchange programs, such as Manoa International Exchange (MIX), Study Abroad Center, and National Student Exchange(NSE). Because these programs operate independently, this means that the relevant information is scattered across their respective platforms. There is no shared channel for the information of various programs to study abroad and exchange. For students who want to go abroad, they need to go to the website of each program and search for relevant information. So we developed this digital platform designed to help them more easily find the programs and informations they want to study abroad and exchange.

In the first milestone the project, I was mainly responsible for creating the project homepage, and I also created the Program selection page. The project homepage contains a brief overview, list of team members, milestone 1 section, and the team contract. The project selection page allows users to select a country/region and a program from dropdown menus. The selection is made from predefined lists of countries and exchange programs. In second milestone I was responsible for setup the filter function, This function make users to select specific study abroad programs or posts of specific countries they want to know. In addition, I was created a page for the introduction of the Study Abroad Center program. In the last milestone of the project, I was responsible for updating the footer of the platform and the overall home page of project, and I also fixed some issues in our team’s code.

What I learned most in this project is project management and teamwork. Before that, I worked alone most of the time. But this team project made me feel the importance of teamwork. We reached a team agreement to regulate the behavior of team members. We used the IDPM process in Agile Project Management to help us manage our projects efficiently. At the start of each new milestone, we assign tasks according to the requirements of the project, and every Monday and Thursday at 5:30 PM we have a team meeting to discuss our progress. We work together to solve the problems we encounter, while conducting code reviews to ensure quality and consistency. This is also the first time that I deeply feel the importance of learning software engineering knowledge. Throughout the entire project development process, I often felt like I wasn’t just doing a school assignment, but was working on a actual development project. I remember when we were studying Agile Project Management, the professor kept saying, “Project management is probably the most important part of this course, maybe even the most important part of your college career… Because it deal with how do you work together with other humans.” At that time, I didn’t quite understand what these words meant, but now that we have finished our project, I finally understand what the professor meant. This experience is not only the completion of an academic task, it allows me to have a deeper understanding of study and work, which is really a meaningful experience.

Link to GitHub Page:
Manoa Study Abroad Central
Link to Home Page:
Manoa Study Abroad Central Home Page