Impressions after completing a thesis

Today I publish a text that is not mine but from Silvia Cortes Yuste, the bachelor student who recently graduated after presenting her thesis and obtaining for it an A with honors. It has been been a pleasure working with her and I hope she can further develop her technical skills and personal aptitudes in further stages of her career. Good luck Silvia !

"You have already had the opportunity to read about GOS in this blog. I’m its first developer, Silvia Cortés, and I’m very proud of it, I feel like its “mother”. I presented my bachelor thesis on the 16^th June in EUETIT-UPC, Terrassa, called "Interfaz Gráfica de Usuario para la Búsqueda de Imágenes basada en Imágenes" (Graphical User Interface for query-by-image image retrieval) and now I’m officially a technical engineer in Telecommunications, finally!

The completion of the thesis was a long and hard process. My availability was very limited and I spent the weekends to work. It means little time to investigate, little time to develop and little time to write the report. And little time to myself, too. I started the project last summer and during a year has been the focus of my life, and of my concerns too. I wanted to do a good job and I’m very hard on work, sometimes too perfectionist. But, at the end, the results are rewarding and recompense the effort. That’s a great satisfaction.

The share of developing the application has been the most fun and entertaining for me. Programming in Java is not easy, especially a GUI (graphic user interface) with Swing, it requires some experience. The greatest difficulty is to combine functionality and aesthetics, giving the graphic elements of a "personality" itself, which is characteristic of the application, but without losing sight of the real needs of the user, and at the same time to avoid the limitations of technology. And this difficulty is at once, one of the more interesting parts of the project since it requires solving capacity and ingenuity. Each line of code is a step forward, and it seems magic when a simple group of lines become a fantastic GUI, like GOS. Then, when you write the report, you realize the real work done. All these steps have led you to the end of the road.

The oral defense was the worse part. I don’t like to public speaking and I get very nervous. I did a rehearsal previous week and I had a rotten time, but the experience was positive, because the public gave me good ideas to improve the presentation. I am very grateful for that, they helped me a lot. The final oral defense was a success, I could control a little more my nerves, and my job with GOS ended.

However, the feeling is that the work is not finished, much remains to be done. You know that Manuel Martos goes on with the GOS development. Good luck!"