Semester Reflection Blog

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 Before starting my final year of college as a computer science major, I reached out to a couple senior friends who graduated earlier this year to ask about their senior year experiences as computer science graduates. Most of them expressed gratitude as they got an opportunity to work on a FOSS project with a team of equally competent and eager batch mates. I couldn't agree with these seniors more. This course's design is excellent since it gets us off on a relatively less complicated but firm foundation by having students engage in meaningful discussions. In all honesty, at first, I was a little bummed that we have to read multiple articles before every class. But over time, I started getting more and more interested in these discussions. This was especially because of the interests the whole class showed and the level of engagement in each session. I used to have a strong imposters syndrome when I communicated or worked around professions in computer science but these discussions introduced me to the world of conversing about computer science and the open-source community. 



When we started looking for open-source projects and then eventually settled on one, and discussed our choices and decisions as a group, it allowed me to get a better and in-depth understanding of why people choose open-source projects and their motivations behind contributing. Over the semester, interacting with the OpenMRS community (my chosen FOSS project), i learned more than i have ever in terms of engagement with the computer science community. Open source projects offers us freedom to explore and express our creativity, but with this freedom comes huge responsibility. Just because we chose to work and contribute on a specific foss project(s) doesn't give us the right to waste project's resources and time for our self gain. It's not just a statement on your resume, it's a real world problem that you are committing to solve with hundreds if not thousands of other like-minded individuals from all around the world. I think learning the importance and handling this responsibility translates to any field we might end up in. I along with my team have built a strong connection and communicative foundation with the OpenMRS community and i can't wait to dive more into it next semester. 

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