So I had originally planned to write an update for each week of the capstone.  In my mind there were grand visions of moronic behavior worthy of writing about each week, sadly most weeks were just repeats of the prior week.  Which still makes the bachelors program at ITT a joke, but doesn't make for a very interesting read.

So I skipped writing about it the rest of the quarters, and will just summarize now. Also, for the record! I got an A in the class, and to my knowledge had the highest grade in the oral exam only missing one question.



If are you just getting ready to take your ISS capstone and are super duper scared (lord knows why), I can tell you with full confidence to relax.  The bulk of your time will be spent doing two things.

1. You will be doing a bull shit waste of time power point every single week. If you are still nervous about speaking to a group of people you have probably been having classes with for the better part of four years, then there is no hope for you.

In general it seemed like you got either a 100% or 0% based on either doing a powerpoint or not.  If your power point sucked harder than an apple fan boy in steve jobs bedroom it didn't matter. So my advice for the power points? Screw them.  Slap together whatever you can the night before, run spell check, and present it.

2. Classwork project related stuff.  This too will suck up as much time as you have to put into it, and I saw lots of groups really slaving over this junk.  If it isn't clear by now, the capstone for ISS has almost nothing technical to do in it, and is almost purely based on filling out paperwork and other project management type garbage. The capstone also assumes that your school is not a pile of dog crap, and has constructed a virtual network for you to reference against the project paperwork.

My school had no such network, so we were forced to literally make up answers to fill in paperwork. 

My advice? Copy and paste as much as possible, and stop thinking about it so hard.  Just get something on the paper and spend more of your time formatting it to look pretty.  The teacher is obviously not going to actually check 6 different groups 30+ page report every week.  Hand in something that gets you in the ball park and move on. That's what we did, and we got an A.

That leaves only two other things to do in capstone, but neither should take much time.

You still need to do your presentation.  This is a total joke, the way the grading works out the presentation is only worth 5% of your total grade.  To honestly do the amount of work my capstone required would take a team of experienced people months to accomplish, and for a lousy 5% it's just not worth it.  Again, slap some nonsense together and just wing it, all those 100%'s for just standing up before will balance it out.

Which leaves the only thing that will trip up most people. The oral exam, which is worth something like 40% of your grade.

I actually really like that they did this because it shines a very bright light on just how stupid most of the students are. They all still pass of course, but it's something.

At this point you should really be able to just bull shit your way through the oral exam. If you are a natural talker then this will obviously be a bit easier, but really, you are about to graduate and most of the questions are pretty basic. My advice? Read over the questions that require real answers and know them.  Some of the questions are specific enough that they require a text book style answer, know that answer. The rest, I would just straight up make up as you go.  Your teacher is probably not that smart, and at the very least certainly doesn't know enough to really disprove things you say.

If a question asks what software you would use to prevent a hacker from doing something, make it up. How does this idiot know the difference? How can you be wrong when a question is that general? Oh yeah, it's an open source project called "no means no", I can't believe it's free!

And that's it, you are done with capstone, and never have to come back to this horrible school again.  /claps

Categories:

4 Responses so far.

  1. SikSol says:

    Hey Josh seen in another post you use to have your power point and the documentation for the associates capstone available for download. The files are no longer available now and I was wondering if there was anyway you could email them my way. Not looking to copy just looking to get a general idea of what all needs to be in it and how it should be done. Like yours our school is full of retards including the instructor and what the paperwork is telling us to do for the project is different from what the instructor is telling us lol. If you could send them my way or a link to download them it would be much appreciated, highpsi.motorsports@gmail.com thanks.

  2. Anonymous says:

    I have a bachelor in ISS from ITT. The only thing I got from it was a job where I was treated like shit. It's worthless beyond that and I'm $70,000 in debt.

  3. Alex says:

    Hi! I enjoyed reading your post as it is very informative and interesting as well. I would love to read some more posts from you in future, will you please tell me the way to subscribe to your blog. Thanks.

    itt capstone project

  4. Unknown says:

    Hey Guys, even though this blog is almost 4 years old, i would like to shed some light on this. The knowledge you gain from ITT really depends on what campus you are at and the teacher for the specific class. In that regards , most of my bachelor technical classes have been taught by one teach except for a few. This teacher works on the core network for the entire financial district for North America. If you don't know , the financial district is HAS to be up 24/7/365. He has just been recruited by Cisco to come work for them and I'll just leave it at that.

    2nd of all , the teachers has a little bit of wiggle room in each class. Yes they have a gradebook in which they need to fill in weekly assignments etc etc. For instance in my ISC capstone , which i am taking as i type this. Mr. D , (main teacher) has written off all of the weekly assignments , and told us to concentrate on the project.

    As far as the project goes , he has taken out all of RFP related tasks and told us to do everything technical. We need a packet tracer file , with 15 locations , different countries obviously. one headquarters and able to support 200,000 end users. It would be too simple to have all locations in one country. 200,000 divided by 5. you do the math. The network has to support that , along with all documentation. IP addresses for routers , switches , subnets etc etc. Along with hardware specs for the servers , endpoints , ap's. All policies are included. What type of security etc etc. All in all the project should be around 120 pages.

    If you are getting treated like shit at your current company , then maybe its time to leave and find a better position. Yes this company is expensive compared to other, and is hard to swallow the students loans aspect. But if you know your shit and can prove that you know it instead of just showing a piece of paper then you SHOULDN'T have to worry about money at all. Within this past year i have received a 16,000 dollar increase by switching companies , and not only that but i have went from a Huge enterprise help desk to a mom and pop company with the credentials to touch servers, routers , switches and more. Don't be a fool and blame it on the on the school. Just because you finish your bachelors DOES NOT Mean that you are entitled to make 50k a year right off the bat. Start in the helpdesk, level 1. Password resets and move your way up.

    Tony

Leave a Reply