One of my options for my industry immersion is either apply to Department of Agriculture, or Philippine National Police of our region. I could request for their existing data, do some data analytics, and come up with some meaningful interpretations that could reveal something new or useful for them.
When I however recalled the surviving rate of DEng and DIT students who enrolled in dissertation course ahead of us, I realized that the next two or three years of my life starting this coming 1st semester should be all about serious and dedicated dissertation work in order to pass the program. No more teaching load, no other projects, and no more monkey business. Otherwise, I might not pass the course, lose my scholarship, and instantly inherit a huge debt.
So in preparation for the most academically challenging phase of my life I am now in the process of vowing to minimize my academic duties in my home school and close all my remaining external projects. Yes, no more new projects!
The problem in my preparation however is I still have one project for a school in our region, USA (University of San Agustin), that was supposed to be fully implemented and closed since last year but unexpectedly still in an "on-going" state until now. The project involves the design and fabrication of a number of customized electronic devices and the programming of their software, which is actually our field of expertise as Computer Engineers. Extending the development of this project beyond this summer term will certainly soon compete for my precious time that is suppose to be allocated for my dissertation study.
I won't be explaining in this blog entry why the project overshoots its scheduled timelines. But I am confident that I could significantly accelerate the development of the project if I could have myself "immersed" as an in-house project manager within the organization of USA rather than just an external 3rd party developer. With my additional authority to directly communicate with the university officials and staffs that are relevant to my project, I could effectively and promptly implement the required system features much faster. No more tedious requests for a meeting that takes days to setup and confirm, and take more additional days or weeks to gather official responses. I could just knock on someone's office door, have a quick chat, sign some documentation papers, and continue back to my programming task in less than an hour.
With this strategy in mind, I applied to USA for my industry immersion study. Shown below is my actual application letter with some of the personal details of the project blurred out for confidentiality.
If my application will be both approved by USA and by our dean, Dr. Ruji P. Medina, I will immediately execute whatever is needed by the project and produce the essential deliverables required by our industry immersion course.
Furthermore, I will also be applying to the project the concepts I learned from our Computer Security, Data Mining, and Distributed Systems courses of our doctoral program.
