Yongbo Qian

CUBE Consulting - Project Manager

 

CUBE Consulting is a newly started technical consulting group, which focuses on Engineering and Business at University of Illinois. It is the first chapter of Junior Enterprise in the United States. I became a project manager during my second semester in this organization. This role requires me to organize and run project teams while actively communicating with project clients. I led a team of five students to assist iFoundry in implementing a project of Interactive Course Catalog.

 

Realizing that the current course catalog is vague, plain, boring and not user-friendly, we aimed to create a website which had a creative and interactive design to put together the best interesting general education courses for engineering James Scholar students. In this way we could have General Education Courses become more meaningful to honor students’ personal goal as engineers.

 

We started a survey asking for engineering students’ favorite general education courses and classified them into different LEAD(Liberal Education Aspiration Development) themes, with some courses link together in some coherent ways which matter more to students. We also presented our website design ideas to iFoundry and Engineering IT Team to implement the website.

 

Since my team members are all intelligent engineering student with solid hands-on ability, as the team leader, I felt supported by their brilliant ideas and opinions; and integrated their input into our decision making process. However, some miscellaneous stuff, such as reacting to client’s delayed response, arranging a meeting time which could work for most people, and clarifying the ambiguous and complex project scope became some unexpected challenges to me. Needless to say, being friendly and approachable to my team members was always important. Fortunately I handled these situations well and did a great job according to the evaluation.