The Dossier

Oh boy. What a fun topic this is going to be.

I'm currently enrolled in IB Computer Science (SL). In this course, we have to complete a large year-encompassing project known only as…. The Dossier. A description of The Dossier sounds simple enough: create a program in Java that addresses a specific problem and document its development. In reality, however, The Dossier is far from simple. It is comprised of 5 sections which are further divided into two or three subsections each. The entire project is recommended to be 60-100 pages long, with an estimated work time of 20-50 hours.

Our Dossiers were recently due. Completing it was not fun. I had crammed all of the work into the final week before its due date due to reasons that I would rather discuss later (get it? Procrastination? Talk about it later? Huh? What's that? You do get it? Cool. Pretty clever, huh?). Needless to say, I was up for quite a while working on the durn thang. I even pulled my first actual all-nighter. Oh what fun that was.

I don't want to bore you with all of the tiny details of my Dossier, so I'll just some it up. My program was designed to create flowcharts. Coding the user interface (the way the screen looks- buttons and such) took foreverrrrrrr. But the coding itself was kinda enjoyable… except for the fact that I had a time limit and I had to document pretty much everything that I was doing.

Eventually, it got done, and I ended up getting the highest grade in the class (Yay me!! ^_^).

I learned an important lesson from this: procrastination is bad. Of course, I already knew this, but it really showed me just what sort of trouble it could get me into. I just hope it doesn't happen again.