Josh's CSUMB Learning BLOG

  Introduction For my industry expert interview I spoke with Kevin Strishock, Director of DevOps at Rivian and Volkswagen Group Technologies. I selected Kevin because of his position as a Director in the company where I want to further develop my career. He has multiple years of experience in this company as well as being a devops leader for many years previous to this company. He has experience from non-automotive industries that he brought to Rivian Volkswagen that have made him successful in the role, which is something I would like to emulate. Summary Kevin started his career as a system administrator, developing deep expertise in managing BSD and linux systems. He said that he still leverages this experience today, joking that he’s been pushing the same buttons for 30 years. Reflecting on his career and what led him to be successful in the automotive industry, his depth serving cloud and IoT businesses was an advantage. Understanding the physical aspects of systems gave him ...

Part 1 I've been working towards a degree for 28 years. My first educational goal is to complete my BS degree in the timeline of this CSUMB program. I am still driving hard to complete an undergraduate degree so I have the option of pursuing further education. I'm interested in an MBA to refine my business leadership skills. My second educational goal is to be accepted to and start an MBA program in the year after completing my BS. Part 2 I want to return to organizational leadership but with a new set of skills that I learn from reaching my educational goals. I want to build and maintain a level of credibility in leading larger organizations than I have in the past, to end my career on a high note.  Part 3 I feel pretty good about the test. From going over the sample I have an idea of what my current gaps are. I think 18 months is plenty of time to close the gaps to get a good score. I think I will get at least 90%. I'm pretty confident in being able to prepare well, but a...

Part 1  Choose a study tip topic you listed as one that needs improvement in your last journal entry. One of my study tip topics I need to improve at is removing distractions. I include procrastination in this category. Making sure I'm well fed and exercised helps me to stay focused. When that's still a problem, turning on some focus-music helps. Something without vocals and with a strong beat can help me find "the zone." Part 2  Update the learning journal to include what you have learned from this week's readings and activities—especially the materials on ethics. I'm familiar with ethics in engineering and business in practice but I have not studied the theory/categorization of different ethical frameworks more than I have this week. Learning more about the different frameworks so I can identify them in practice is something I can carry with me day-to-day. Knowing the different frameworks can help me understand others' point of view - is what they are do...

Part 1 Top 3 things I'm good at:  keeping to a schedule  extracting meaning and main ideas when reading writing from an outline Top 3 things that need work: removing distractions from my study space taking notes consistently going back to recite what I've read Part 2 Part 3 Projects are efforts to complete some objective that is aligned with a business strategy in a way that is bound by time, cope, and cost. The project manager is the CEO of a project, responsible for its execution. A work breakdown structure is a hierarchical breakdown of all deliverables in a project. It's organized from the entire project scope to major deliverables, and then recursively any sub-deliverables until there is an exhaustive list. The purpose is to define the full scope of the project and support creating a schedule and budget. Gantt charts are used to plan projects by drawing bars across a horizontal timeline indicating the start and end of each task. Each task lives on its own row in the ch...

 This week I'm spending time learning about the CS Online program and getting myself up to speed with the new schedule and assignments. Meeting professors and team members and learning about everyones' backgrounds is a good reminder of how different all of our journeys are and that everyone is bringing something unique to bear on how we progress over the next two years. Really looking forward to it!