If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail!
30 Sep 2021
Why use RadGrad? At first I did not know either and thought this exercise to be merely a clever ploy to increase the number of students on the platform but after going through the tutorial and seeing the wealth of information and connecting opportunities, I quickly realized that this was not just an alternate version of STAR geared towards computer science students, it was actually STAR on steroids with a booster shot of LinkedIn.
Started from the beginning
The whole process of completing my RadGrad profile was fairly intuitive and the tutorial provided illustrated the key points. While going through the interests explorer, the descriptions of the various disciplinary areas introduced to me a few interests I would like to pursue in the future that I did not even know existed. The career goals explorer was really helpful too as it showed what umbrella category different careers fell in to. However, the course explorer did not really give me much additional information per se as I already have obsessively looked over the ICS catalog while degree planning previously. One lovely point though was that the descriptions of all of the courses were there and easy to see, unlike the degree planning sheets available on the UHM website. Lastly, the opportunities section introduced me to a lot of extracurricular activities that I either barely heard of or never heard of before; I will be definitely joining a few of those. All of these sections had really useful filtering systems like “In Profile” versus “Not in Profile”, course division level, and the sortings.
(1) Message Request
I quite enjoyed perusing through the community tab as it showed the students, related faculty members, and advisors in the different sections. You can also click on the names of a student or professor and see their contact information, their UH e-mail; possibly implementing a way to either e-mail from RadGrad or a messaging system could be useful for making those connections easily and on the same platform instead of relegating to e-mail. The upcoming events were also a great section of RadGrad as not only did it show the dates and deadlines of the various events but also the interests applicable to them. I also like that the careers, interests, and courses all relate to each other and show a sort of ‘trajectory’, like showing what courses can apply to what interests and what interests apply to what careers. It is very important to plan out the courses and how they align with your future goals as failing to plan is a plan for failure, a la Benjamin Franklin.
Imperfectly perfect
Indeed, RadGrad is a very useful tool for computer science students here at UHM. However, I believe all websites and applications will inherently have their own flaws and can always be improved. Firstly, as the screenshot above shows, it feels like RadGrad is ‘roasting’ my career goals by just saying they are ‘OK’ and not good nor excellent. Another issue I found is that for the courses it was only ICS courses and not other departments, for example I have to take a few mathematics courses for the Data Science track of the Computer Science BS degree and it would have been good to have that planning ability too. Besides these few finicky points, overall RadGrad was easy to use and had a very clean layout that was easy on the eyes and sleek looking. I would for sure recommend this to any computer science student that is at UHM as if I was not such an obsessive course planner, this would truly came in handy when it came to planning semesters and also the respective courses for specified interests and career goals.