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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 :).