Patrick R. McElhiney is currently being groomed for a PhD Track, that he has yet to decide of whether he is going to pursue or not. It would entail McElhiney continuing his education, after he graduates with his M.S. in Information Technology from the University of New Hampshire (UNH) in Manchester. The PhD degree program would be through UNH Durham, which is just about 10 miles away from McElhiney's home office located in Barrington, New Hampshire. Patrick has visited the Durham campus several times so far during his Master's Degree to work on computer programming tasks, so it would just be a continuation of what Patrick has already been doing.
The program is being recommended by Professor Michael Jonas, PhD, from the Manchester Campus. He has taught three of Patrick's classes in his Master's degree so far. McElhiney has maintained a 4.0 GPA, even through the Summer of 2017, when he took three classes - each of which lasted only 10 weeks. This would have been equivalent to about 16 credit hours during a normal semester, which is usually 15 or 16 weeks long. Jonas was impressed with the work that Patrick did on MeAndYou, in his Independent Study class, which was a continuation of COMP 830 - Object Oriented Software Engineering.
MeAndYou.us is a social media / dating type of website that was originally designed by a group of about 8 students in COMP 830, last year. Then McElhiney did major work on it with his COMP 830 class this year, and he continued to work on it with an Independent Study with Michael Jonas over the summer. He has the website matching multiple types of searches to different users, in which both the searcher and the search-ee must be looking for each other at the same time.
Patrick has also offered to use MeAndYou as his Master's Project, in which he will presumably write a Master's Thesis on later next year, before he graduates from the Master's degree program. Other students have provided positive commentary on the progress that McElhiney has made on the website. Before going to school at UNH, Patrick didn't know how to code PHP with Database calls to MySQL on his own - so this is an entirely new skill he has developed.
Like anything, Computer Programming is a lot more complicated than building one website. It will likely be the career of Patrick R. McElhiney, with his background in Marketing and Computer Science as well as Information Technology. Patrick has learned a lot from going to school at UNH - much more than he ever learned during his Bachelor's degree or Law School. Patrick is happy with where he is today, and he looks forward to improving his software development skills more in the coming years.
