Before I began my third semester at Lone Star College, I wanted to take a physics honors class. Then my honors director convinced me that since I had not taken a university physics class yet, attempting to work on an honors project while still learning the material and attending the class would not produce the best project. Through many meetings with him we were able to come up with something I could do for an honors project this semester. I could come up with a potential topic, and then work with a professor one on one to work on this project. After a few meetings, this professor and I came up with an interesting idea to try and build our own information retrieval system, or search engine, for the math department website. We both thought it would be an exciting, and significantly challenging endeavor considering neither of us knew how they functioned, but we still knew the basics, like the fact that they utilized linear algebra. I have never even taken a class on linear algebra, but because I needed and wanted to know about it, I learned it enthusiastically, and I never studied a subject with such enthusiasm before. As of right now we are still working on we are still working on creating it, and I am working on the paper portion of the project as well, but I have learned so much …show more content…
Neither of us have much experience in programming, but I, at least, have been learning much more quickly than I would have in a classroom setting. Before this project, I thought only graduate students worked directly with professors on projects and papers. Now that I have experienced working on a project of my choosing, I believe that if there were enough professors to go around, this experience would benefit anyone who wants to learn new