Tag: Computer Science

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Woes of Job-Hunting

It is no secret that job-hunting for most people is not fun. In fact, if you like job-hunting or overall enjoy the process, consider yourself a unicorn.

Last year during October, I pushed myself hard to find an internship, I spend most of my free time outside of school hunting. It was a process that was long, rough, and it made my imposter syndrome far worse. At the end of this long process, I finally got an internship with a company asked me about my personal projects which related to the job far more than any coding assessment and impressed my manager.

Excerpt of my compiled job-hunting Google Sheet.

Now that October is here again, and my graduation quickly on the horizon, I am in full swing of job-hunting once again. In an effort to really see how much work I am putting in to this process while in school, I decided that I was going to track the jobs that I applied to in a Google Sheet. I am also someone who tends to like numbers, given that my first degree was in Mathematics with a focus on statistics. I was greatly interested in the numbers game I would be playing trying to find an entry level job during an economic downturn right before I graduate.

Current running total of my job applications, rejections, ghosts, initial phone screens, interviews, and offers.

Ironically, when my capstone group was given the list of potential projects we could do, the fact that two of us were job hunting was a huge reason why we wanted to do the job tracker project. Not only this, but the two of us were also compiling similar lists of what jobs we had applied for. We realized that we knew really well what the end user’s needs would be for a website like this. Not only this, but we had a lot of data we could use for the development database, since we both had very similar tables. As a group we also understood that job hunting will never be fun, but making it easier to track what jobs you have applied to, and have numbers on it, does make life a lot easier.

While job-hunting is a long and difficult process, luckily as a group we were given the information and drive to make something of it. Hopefully the job-hunt gets better in the future, but while that happens we get to make a really cool project that will help us in the future.

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A Retrospective of my Software Engineering Journey

Hello World everyone! My name is Alyssa Comstock, and I’m happy to announce this is my final term before I graduate here at Oregon State University! To say that my journey though my computer science degree has been rough is an understatement. Because of this I am proud to have gotten this far.

I am a post-baccalaureate student. My previous degree was in Mathematics, which I received in August 2019 from Portland State University. Even before this, I had tried to pursue my computer science degree at Portland State University, however as a freshman I made a lot of mistakes, and this resulted in me changing my degree path. At the time I thought that was what I wanted, however as time went on, and when I finally graduated, I realized that my interests still gravitate towards programming, software engineering, and website development related topics. When the pandemic hit a few months after graduating the first time, going back to school for something I really enjoyed was an easy choice. Oregon State University offering remote classes with a bonus.

Growing up, my mother was also a computer scientist, and hearing her talk about computers and software always interested me. This was the first thing that planted the seed in my mind, that this was something that I enjoyed. Not only this, but I grew up in a time where social media was not as much of a thing, but virtual pet websites like Neopets were greatly popular with people my age. On Neopets, kids were often given their first chance to program very simple HTML / CSS websites, which I thought was the coolest thing EVER at 10 years old. I wanted to make every website that I touched glittery! The combination of being surrounded by tech-y people, and being given access to the tools to learn very simple website development from a young age was what really got me interested in these topics.

Now that I am almost at the end of my journey getting my computer science degree, I like to think about how proud past me would be of how far I’ve come from my time at Portland State University. I think 10 year old me who got their start coding small HTML / CSS websites would think it is super cool that I can make every website glittery if I wanted to :).