Before starting my master’s studies, after completing my bachelor’s degree, thanks to the educational program 122 “Computer Science,” I was able to see many different directions, understand the differences between them, and form for myself a modest yet substantial canvas called “IT.”
In the final year of my bachelor’s studies, there was an opportunity to choose an elective discipline, and I selected one of those taught at the UPIT department. I can say with confidence that this opened another direction for me—and it was not just another trendy DBMS or yet another OOP programming language. It was precisely the direction that shows how a project is formed, executed, and completed. This direction creates an entirely new abstraction, which I would call “From A to Z.” Why such a name? Because it is from idea to result.
During the learning process—being honest—it was difficult to understand at times, and many questions arose: “Why?”, “What is this for?”, “Do we really need this?”, “Who is this for?”, and so on. One of the reasons, and at the same time a unique feature that led to many of these questions, was the format of education at this department. During the master’s program, learning actually takes place through working on one’s own project—a product developed under the supervision of a thesis advisor and, in the end, assembled into a single diploma thesis. Each small completed part in each semester becomes a separate section of the thesis: design, business plan, MVP development. Almost every discipline of every semester during this time only helped me in implementing the project, showed its components, and answered my questions. I liked the approach that the lecturers at the department described as: “We want you not to do unnecessary things.” A few days before the thesis defense, I thought, “Wow, I have completed an entire project—now I know how this is done,” and only after going through all the stages of the project, from initiation to completion, did I realize that now I can create my own project and bring my idea to life.
In my opinion, this was a valuable experience that unified and structured all the IT knowledge I had accumulated over time and taught me to think in a project-oriented way—“From A to Z.”
P.S. Life is also our own project 🙂
— Bocharyov Dmytro, Class of 2025