Submission of the UCAM Master’s thesis
But the really funny story was how UCAM handled the submission of the master’s thesis. They gave us a deadline which was somewhere during September. New semesters start at UCAM at the end of October. Thus, there were official holidays and no one of the professors was really busy these days. Enough time to be prepared for incoming theses and for everyone else from the administrational staff to do some open projects.
The exact deadline was September 18, 2017. A Monday. Good for the students to have still a full weekend to adjust the last corrections and polish everything perfectly. Remember, what I wrote about the opportunity to do some open projects. Great! A bonus day for us to polish everything even shinier.
Still a bit weird, if the course coordinator informs you on a Friday at noon, that the systems aren’t available on Monday, huh?! Seems a bit awkward and extremely last-minute planned. But yeah…
On Tuesday, the apocalyptic chaos for every master student with that deadline erupted. The reason why the so called-virtual campus wasn’t ready the day before was the implementation of a completely new system. Not only that the look and feel were completely different. Some technical features and functionalities were completely lost, hidden, or unable to find.
Disregarding, that approximately 150 master students had their deadline and needed to upload their files, it was probably the dumbest idea to schedule it during this period. Of course, the untested und unbalanced system crashed and couldn’t handle all the hits of the students. If 150 students try to upload their digital theses with heavy data, it doesn’t need a clairvoyant to foresee a crash. My file had even with the lowest resolution of many photos maybe about 19 megabytes. Multiply that times 150 and you know the amount of data size the new system had to deal with. No wonder, that it crashed.
Whoever of the IT department of UCAM had the golden idea to implement a completely new system without testing it and making it bug-free must’ve been completely demented. They had almost four months of summer vacations and scheduled a critical system update for the most inconvenient moment. These people were nuts and probably project managers suffering from insanity.
Well this Tuesday, of course, was a new experience for 150 master students of UCAM about how to handle stress professionally. I was one of the few lucky people who somehow made it even with the technical problems. But the majority was probably going insane this day and cursed our good old catholic university from Murcia.
UCAM postponed again because of these problems the deadline to September 22. Of course with the hope, that all technical adjustments were fully functioning then. For me, that all didn’t matter anymore. I didn’t require even more bonus days and declared my document for finished.
Next page: What about the defense of the Master’s thesis by UCAM?