For the first blog post, I want to talk about how I started my journey at OSU. Before joining the program, I studied biochemistry for my first undergraduate degree. I have always been interested in working and solving problems so when I attended my first chemistry lab and got to design my own experiment, I was instantly hooked. My first exposure to coding was when I took a statistics class where many assignments involved using the programming language R. Because this was primarily a statistics class and not a programming class, many of the concepts were briefly introduced and I only learned to use a handful of functions. Even then, coding felt like I was working with magic. With just a few lines of code, I was able to grab multiple sets of data and generate multiple graphs almost instantaneously.
After graduating undergrad, I joined the microbiology team at a cancer research institute. As a research assistant, the majority of my time was spent conducting experimental trials and collecting data. It was in this position that I got exposed to working databases. As I got to work more closely with the data scientists on the team, I became more familiar with using SQL to query data and incorporating basic Python codes to automate processes. Over time, I became more interested in working with software and data as opposed to continuing with my career in the life sciences, which was attending graduate school. I began to take a few free online courses for programming, one of them being MIT’s Intro to Programming in Python. As I learned more about programming and started to take on more projects involving large data sets at work, I felt more confident that I wanted to pursue a career using software to solve real-life problems.
Through the recommendation from my colleagues, I discovered that OSU offers a post-baccalaureate program for Computer Science. I decided to enroll at the end of 2021. While my current interests are in back-end and data analysis, I am excited to learn about all the new technologies wherever this field may take me. Because this is such a broad and ever-changing field with innovations at every corner, it is exciting but also crucial to keep up with the current trend. It has been almost 3 years since the start of my journey at OSU and this will be my second to last term. I can’t wait to close out this chapter with a fun capstone project and start down this new career path.
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