about me

Hi, everybody, my name is Shuning Xu. You can call me Shirley. I am from Hangzhou, China. And I can speak Chinese and English. This is my first year in RMIT, and I am studying Bachelor of Information Technology. After I finished my second year of high school in China, I came to Monash Collage to study for the foundation year course. Cause of some reasons, after graduation, I chose to study at RMIT.


I stayed in Melbourne for a year and a half. I really like the free and casual atmosphere of Melbourne. It makes me feel very relaxed.


I like to listen to songs, read books, eat delicious food with my friends and hang out with friends in my free time. I also want to challenge exciting rides, such as skydiving. If I have a chance in the future, I will definitely try it! My favourite sport is badminton, when I play badminton, I feel very relaxed. This sport makes me joyful.


Interest in IT

I am interested in mobile application making. With the development of IT industry, there are more and more applications on cell phones, and people's life becomes more and more convenient because of these applications. For example, in China, we used to need to bring cash when we go out to buy things, but now we just need to take our cell phones with us when we go out, and we can pay for almost all goods through our cell phones. I also benefit from the fact that when I am studying, I no longer need to look up a word I don't know through a dictionary as inefficiently as I do. I can just type in what I want to find on my phone accurately and efficiently. When I was in junior high school, I got my first smartphone and I downloaded many applications, which significantly improved my life. The usefulness of these applications has made me interested in the IT industry, especially the mobile application development. I began to learn about the IT industry and found that the industry is fair, the better you do, the more you get. It also has high returns and good development prospects, making me more interested in this industry. My first exposure to IT was in high school. However, everything is difficult at the beginning. All we learned was basic programming, but to be honest, I was very painful at the beginning and even wanted to give up, but my high school information technology teacher has been encouraging me. Slowly, I started to adapt, and I feel the joy of learning.


When I graduate form Monash Collage, I am hesitant to continue studying in Monash or transfer to RMIT. But finally, I chose to study in RMIT. I choose RMIT for many reasons. First of all, RMIT's information technology major is very famous and highly rated, I hope I can get a better education in my undergraduate degree. Also, the surrounding facilities of RMIT are very convenient. The most important reason is that my sister graduated from RMIT, she studied computer science and did very well, after graduation, she easily found a job. Her learning experience, the culture and learning atmosphere of RMIT she introduced to me made me choose to study at RMIT more firmly.


During the RMIT study, I want to learn more about knowledge of IT, I hope to improve my technical skills and be skilled in the application of Java, Python, HTML. These essential skills for future work lay the foundation.

ideal job - Junior software developer

This company’s junior software development engineer position hopes to find graduates interested in learning and exploring different types of software development and join them to develop cutting-edge applications and services that support cross-asset transactions and risk management. What attracts me to this company is that after joining, I can learn from senior personnel with extensive experience in technology and finance, enriching my knowledge. Besides, after entering, I can also choose other career paths, even I can have opportunity to study and work in London.
This job requires me to have the following skills, qualifications and experience:
o Computer Science /Software Engineering Degree
o Proficient analysis, design and development skills
o More than 3 years of experience in C++, C# or Java
o Experience with relational databases and SQL is better

I have studied basic programming when I was in high school, and I am currently in college majoring in Information Technology. I have only been exposed to Python and SQL so far, which means I need to learn more about Java. Also, I will need to choose a major in Computer Science for my master's degree. Besides, I have no experience working in the IT industry, so I need to gain software production experience in my sophomore or junior year to strengthen my software analysis, design and development capabilities.

personality test

These three tests have given me a more detailed understanding of myself. The tests showed that I am a person who is better at working with others to complete tasks, more responsible and likes to help others, which are my strengths, and I need to keep them. However, at the same time, I am more introverted, do not like to change, and lack creativity and imagination, which are not suitable for me in my future study and work, so I need to change in order to achieve more in the future. When forming a team in the future, I need to improve my deficiencies, communicate more with others, and find teammates who can complement my weaknesses to help the team develop better.

Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) test

Learning style test

Big Five Personality test

Project idea

Overview

This project is a mobile educational application that integrates listening, reading, writing and speaking of many foreign languages. In this application, we need to record each country’s language as much as possible into our application and invite educators from those countries to write tutorials for learning the languages of each place. This includs listening and writing exercises, and having native speakers of each country join the project to help our users practice their speaking skills.
Readings from each country will also appear in our application to provide a way for our users to read.

Motivation

When I was in high school, I was first introduced to languages other than English. In our local foreign language exams, you can take other languages besides English, such as German and French. It would make the exam a lot easier. But as far as I know, very few people actually took other language tests and those who did scored poorly. There were no excellent mobile applications to help them study, so they had to buy expensive, but not very effective tutorials, which made me think about this aspect of language learning. Nowadays, the demand for language workers is starting to grow, but most of the existing language education applications on the app store are only for learning a single language. Therefore, I had an idea about multi-language application development.

Description

The most significant advantage of our application is that it has a comprehensive range of languages. Most language learning educational applications on the app store contain only one language, so if you want to learn another language, you need to download multiple applications, which is very troublesome and takes up a lot of memory on your phone. Our application will include as many languages in the world as possible, including minority language. It will be constantly upgraded to save our users the trouble of downloading multiple language learning applications. Language workers, language lovers and minority language learners are all well suited to our application. Language workers and lovers need to learn about multiple languages, and we have just the proper application to meet their needs and facilitate their learning and exploration. For minority language learners, there are very few applications on the app store for minority language learning. Most of them have to buy some expensive offline tutorials, so they need an application like ours.

Besides, our application has exercises for each language. First of all, there are listening exercises for each language to help people who need to take the test to improve their listening skills. Secondly, the speaking part, we will invite native speakers of each country to join our application, so that our users can communicate with the locals of each country regularly and practice their daily communication skills. At the same time, we will also arrange speaking teachers and provide speaking courses to help users who need to take the test to improve their performance. We will also design a particular communication community where our users can ask questions. When the teachers see their questions, they will reply in time, and they can also discuss with other students. Then there is the reading part, we will add the reading materials in the language we have to the application and provide them to our users, so that they can reduce the time of looking for the reading materials they need on multiple platforms. The last part is writing. We will have professional writing instructors and writing courses to help our users improve their writing skills. Thirdly, our application will have a short trial period, which is very friendly for those who want to try application’s functions before buying the premium features, users can purchase it after they feel satisfied with it, and the price of the our application will be customized to be more affordable so that most people can afford to use it. Finally, and most importantly, the application will not require users to use a virtual private network to use it, which means that users in some countries will no longer need a virtual private network like they do with Facebook. They can easily log in to our application and communicate with people in other countries by simply using their own country's network. This will save them a ton of money.

Tools and Technologies

The development of an application requires labor and effort-intensive, it can't be done by one person, it has many different parts. Therefore, we need a professional team to develop this application together. Mobile application development needs to start by having our UI design department determine the design style of our application. Then the code needs to be written, which requires our software engineers to be proficient in Java language and XML knowledge for making Android applications, also Objective-C language and Xcode development environment for iOS applications. Finally, after the application is made, we have to test the application several times to make sure there are no problems before we can put our application to the app store. Hardware wise, depending on our future scale, we may also need to purchase one or more servers.

Skills required

We are going to use Java language and Objective-C language for this software. I am currently studying information technology, which means I will be exposed to these languages in the future, so I need to be proficient in these two languages and also know how to use XML environment and Xcode development environment. Of course, I won't be the only one writing code. Therefore, I need to make more friends with my majors during my college years so that I can invite them to join my team in the future, and I also need to find programming jobs during my internship to be proficient in my skills. Design and diplomacy are not my strengths, so I will recruit someone more professional to do these parts.

Outcome

If this project is successful, more and more people with language learning needs will benefit from our application. Of course, this cannot be done without advertising, so we will need to put effort into promoting our application once it is finished. Since our application will not be costly, this means that we also need to find investors or partners so that our team can get financial support. Also, as the number of people using our application increases, our team needs to expand, so we need to recruit more technical people to join us and make sure our application can serve our users better. Although there will be many problems in the later stages, I still have great expectations for our project. It will allow more people to have access to learning multiple languages without spending a lot of money. With global development and integration, learning an additional language will increase people's chances of getting a job. For example, a low educated person can get a job as a tour guide in another country by learning a foreign language. It can also bring attention to languages outside the mainstream, such as Latin, and make more minority languages accessible to people in other countries.