There is no such thing as a “typical day” for Functional Analyst Selina McGinnis. She usually has between two to four projects underway at any time, but her roles in those projects can vary from designing applications to working directly with clients to testing.
Each morning, Selina and the rest of the Agile team gather for a Scrum meeting. At the meeting, each team member discusses accomplishments and challenges from yesterday and goals for today. For the rest of the morning, Selina works on external projects. Often, she’ll meet with users to discuss ideas and issues. In the afternoon, she and the Agile team work on designing the interface for a new system.
Currently, Selina is working on a project to develop a Research Administration Information System (RAIS) to support the Office of the Vice-President Research. This project is particularly exciting for Selina, as it is her “first chance designing an interface from scratch.”
The RAIS project may take up to two years to complete. Selina will also be involved in a future project revamping NetLink IDs, but for the most part, the future is a mystery. That’s not a problem for Selina, who enjoys the excitement of not knowing what’s coming next. She even compares it to the excitement of opening presents on Christmas morning.
Selina has only been with Systems for about a year and a half, but already she has worked on a number of unique projects. Last year, she had the opportunity to serve as project manager for a project setting up a webcam to view an osprey nest perched on an 80-foot floodlight in UVic’s playing field. The completed project even gained national attention with a CBC article.
Though she has no formal education in technology, Selina grew up working with computers. Originally, a love of insects encouraged Selina to study entomology, but when she found herself dissecting insects rather than celebrating them, she realized that wasn’t the path for her.
Before coming to Systems, Selina worked in UVic’s Office of the Registrar. Her role mostly involved scanning and filing student records, but she occasionally had a chance to work on web projects. Her talent for completing these web projects became well-known, and when a position opened up for a functional analyst, one of the client account managers in Systems encouraged her to apply.
Selina’s hobbies are just as varied as her workdays. She plays rugby daily, volunteers with Search and Rescue, and plays the saxophone in a swing band. In the band, she jokes that she is the “youngest member by 35 years.”
Selina encourages anyone interested in becoming a functional analyst to ask plenty of questions. She also encourages attending code reviews—coffee meetings for developers to share their coding work and get feedback from peers. Because the developers often start by explaining the process they followed to write the code, the reviews are a great spot to learn programming.
Learning has been a major part of Selina’s role in Systems, and there really is no better place for it. Everyone in Systems is an “expert on something,” Selina says. And working in a department with nearly two-hundred experts is what really makes every day a unique adventure.