Hello, World! Welcome. My name is Zachary Adkins, but I often go by just Zach. I live in Pennsylvania so I’m 3 hours ahead of OSU’s time zone. I am a full-time student and have been for about 3.5 years now. Coming to OSU was my first experience with higher-level education. Life happened after high school, and I took several years off. So, currently I am 28 years old and should be graduating within the next year and a half! Woo! I am very excited.
My time consists mostly of schoolwork, but I do have a few hobbies. I mostly enjoy playing video games. I used to play a lot of Call of Duty and Counter-Strike but have moved on to less competitive games. I mostly play Path of Exile and Runescape nowadays.
Runescape is surprisingly the game that got me into computers. I started playing when I was about 12 years old and learned to type quickly on this game. I became interested in programming when I started to think about how Runescape was made. This simple game really was the beginning of a long journey that has brought me to where I am today. What started as a small curiosity in game development has flourished into a huge passion for programming and the Software Industry. For the two years leading up to the pandemic, I was researching game development and general programming stuff and found a Python course on Udemy that I followed, teaching me some very basic practices and general Python knowledge. My best friend from high school was graduating from university at this time as well, and ended up in the Software Industry, which allowed some insight into what the career would be like. Covid rolled around and everything went remote, so I entertained obtaining an online degree. By the end of 2020, I was enrolled here at OSU and by January of 2021, I was taking my first college class.
I feel like I have learned so much from the classes I’ve taken. Even some of the core general education courses have been enlightening. I have 5 quarters left before graduating, which are all very CS heavy workloads and I can’t wait to see what else I will learn.
This Senior Project class seems to be one of the most interesting ones in the program. Having looked over the project repository, I think I’m going to greatly enjoy this one. I’m going to list the projects that I applied for and a little blurb about each one below.
- NES Emulator – This project seems to be all about low-level programming. Honestly, I loved Assembly language. That class was one of the most enjoyable classes I’ve taken so far. If I get assigned to this project, I’m eager to see how more advanced low-level programming feels. I’m not sure about which specialization/field to target after graduation so this project could be eye opening.
- Artificial Life Simulation – This project just sounds and looks incredible. The potential for this project seems to be through the roof and it is the most “awesome” project in my opinion. I have zero clue how to develop something like this but I would be excited to figure it out.
- Top-N Music Genre Classification – I’ve heard about Keras and Tensorflow. I’m quite experienced with Python. I’ve watched videos of incredible programmers and mathematicians developing neural networks from scratch. I also LOVE music. This project looks to be pretty awesome.
- Engineering Simulations with Game Development Tools – This project appeals to the physics lover in me. I am currently taking General Physics with Calculus (PH 211) and am taking PH 212 next quarter. I’ve been a huge physics nerd for a long time but never formally educated until now. I’m excited to see what these classes have to offer, and I would love to contribute to the physics aspects of this project if these classes teach the relevant information (or not. I love learning so I would be willing to learn more physics!).
- Travel Planner Website – I have always entertained becoming a full-stack web developer. It’s sort of my safety net specialization. The work seems to be pretty enjoyable to me given what I’ve experienced so far in classes here at OSU. I’m much more interested in fields like AI, ML, data-driven fields, and game development, but web development is important and this project seems like it would absolutely solidify my understanding.
I look forward to seeing what this series of courses is going to bring me! Regardless of which project I get assigned to, I know that I’m going to have an absolute blast. I’m hard-working, very easy to get along with, and my availability allows for communication/grouping with pretty much anyone. Thank you for reading my post! Catch ya next time.