Author: Natasha Stockfleth

I find it interesting that for a field that is so centered around teamwork, we spend so much of this program working alone. This capstone project has been the most in-depth team project I have worked on throughout my time with OSU and it has been a truly eye-opening experience for me. The main thing that has stood out to me is that I have become so accustom to my own style of coding, that I find myself struggling to adapt to other people’s coding styles. Thankfully, this is only a minor struggle but one that I also find somewhat comical.

We spend a fair amount of time in this program discussing style. Whether it be appropriate variable names, lengthiness of comments or other readability aspects, it seems every class, and language for that matter, comes with different preferences. But I think because I haven’t spent a lot of time looking at other peoples code, I hadn’t noticed until this project, that every person chooses which bits and pieces of that information is going to stick with them.

Most recently I had to create a form that produced a specific JSON output. While the formatting was tricky, the part that had me banging my head on my desk was my own stubbornness to naming conventions. I found myself rewriting every input name to correct the camel case I inevitably typed or the shorthand that I kept trying to make happen. It was just another piece of humble pie that I was didn’t know needed.

You know the saying “the world works in mysterious ways”? Well, I whole heartedly believe it. Just the other night, after spending all day working on my project, I was casually browsing job postings on LinkedIn when my sister called. Over the last several months I have been slowly starting my job search and while talking to my sister I was telling her how crazy the tech industry is in the Bay Area. We were both in shock as I was reading off the applicant stats to her.

“Software Engineer (New Grad/Early Career) posted 4 days ago. 146 applicants. 52% of the applicants have a bachelors degree. 44% of the applicants have a masters degree…”

I remember saying to her “I’m going to have to hit every key word they are looking for in order for anyone to even SEE my resume.” We both laughed, mine a lot more nervous than hers. I wasn’t necessarily feeling discouraged. I just knew that at that moment, I wasn’t prepared to put the effort into looking for a job that it’s likely going to require. I want to finish this last term strong and make a project that I am proud of. The job will hopefully come after.

Then this morning as I was skimming through my emails I saw an email for a company I had applied to a few weeks back and they wanted to set up an interview. It’s for an entry level job at a smaller company just outside the Bay Area. It’s exactly what I have been looking for. Somewhere that I can get some experience under my belt without all the pressures of a big company. I reread the email a few times just to be sure it wasn’t a weirdly specific spam email. Turns out it wasn’t and I’m set to chat with them about it next week. And even if it ends up just being an interview, I’ll still get to walk away with more experience than I have today. It feels like progress.

Over the last few years that I’ve been coding, I find myself becoming extremely anxious at the thought of starting new projects. Whether it be a class assignment or a side project I have thought up on my own, the simple task of just getting started fills me with an overwhelming feeling of dread. Which, until recently, led me into an endless cycle of procrastination and more anxiety. I would spend days procrastinating working on class assignments by keeping myself busy with other meaningless tasks (like cleaning out the pantry or reorganizing the bookshelf) just to finally get started with my project and realize that I may not have allowed myself enough time to finish it. As the deadline would approach and more bugs would appear in my code, I would become more and more stressed and overrun by anxiety that I may not get it finished in time. This vicious cycle has brought with it many long nights, coding until the early morning hours and even more uneasiness at the start of the next project. That is, until I realized that all I needed to do was rip off the bandaid.

Last term I finally took Operating Systems after many terms of procrastinating it. I have heard so many horror stories about the class that I was so nervous for that first assignment. But to my own surprise, I jumped right into it, giving myself the full two weeks to work on it. It was the most stress free assignment I’d ever worked on and I felt so accomplished turning it in. That’s when I broke the cycle. I realized that all the time I had previously spent procrastinating projects to avoid the anxiety brought on by its difficulty, only fueled it. Hindsight is always 20/20. So I spent the rest of the term starting the assignments as soon as they became available. Some days I didn’t make any progress on them, but I gave it my best effort, and came back the next day to try again. I still struggled with assignments. I still had to fight last minute bugs. But I had more time and patience that I hadn’t had in the past.

It’s this same mentality, that I’m trying to bring with me into this term. This project has been weighing on me since last term. Knowing that it was such a big and important project brought back a lot of those same unproductive feelings. But I’m thankful that I have a group that is eager to get started and has worked to make a bit of progress everyday. I find myself thinking about the project in my spare time and grabbing my computer even if it’s just to do some research. I am doing everything I can to keep my motivation up and avoid the cycle that I have found myself in time and time again.

Two weeks ago I sat down at my computer, planning to casually browse the available capstone projects. Over the last few months I had seen several threads popup on Reddit soliciting group members, with long explanations of project ideas, a lot of which didn’t make much sense to me. They all seemed like very niche topics that I had no knowledge of. At that moment it seemed pretty clear that I would be better off working a project from the class provided list. I just had no idea what was going to be on that list and boy was I shocked when I started looking it over. NDA requirements, stock market trading strategies, self-driving simulators. I shut my computer. I was in way over my head.

A few days later, I found my self back on Reddit. I saw a post from someone a few terms ago that seemed to be in the same mental space as myself. They were feeling underprepared and inadequate. But then I read it -“…self teaching is to be expected…because that’s how tech works. The sooner you can get into the mindset that research and self learning is required the better you will do in this industry. There is a ton of help if you want it but you have to search, ask, read, be willing to try things that may not work, and then be willing to START OVER and TRY AGAIN to get that help. This is essence is what being in school is all about.”(Shout out to u/Significant_Mtheme37) Aha! This final project is my opportunity to pick out exactly what I want to learn from this program. Once I changed my mindset, picking just one project I wanted to work on seemed impossible. I have a background in emergency telecommunications, should I pick the Fire Risk Predictor? I love a good bottle of wine, what about Wine Data Lake? The job hunt is right around the corner, why not help write the Job Tracker?

I can now happily announce that my group and I are well on our way to creating a Citizen Science app to be used by K-12 students and teachers. Additionally, over the last few days I have been enjoying learning React-Native, researching noSql databases and brushing up on my web development knowledge. I am excited to continue learning from my teammates and on my own.

“Hello world!”…I’ve never seen a more appropriate greeting to a blog. Like many others, the very first program I learned to write was a simple Hello World program in Java. I was in my first official class in the Computer Science program at Southern Oregon University, the same college I had graduated from five years earlier. In that moment, I felt such a sense of accomplishment. I had taken the first step towards my future career aspirations. The world was mine for the taking…or at least that’s what I thought.

Over the next year and a half with SOU, I struggled with my coursework. I was working 50+ hours a week as a law enforcement dispatcher, on night shift, all while trying to keep up with my 8am classes. During this time, SOU’s CS program was also going through some major changes. The tenured professors were nearing retirement and the department was struggling to find adequate replacements. The number of working interviews (hopeful applicants would come teach a class on their topic of choice) we had to watch was painful. I could feel myself getting burnt out. That’s when I stumbled upon Oregon State University’s post bacc CS program. It was exactly what I needed. I put in my application and was accepted.

I started with OSU spring term of 2020. I was so nervous after having struggled so much towards the end of my time at SOU. I had predominantly coded in Java and C and had zero experience with Python. Thankfully, it was right at the start of the pandemic, so I was spending all of my free time at home. I spent spring break that year binge watching Lost and studying Python. I was able to adapt to the structure at OSU fairly quickly and after leaving my job as a dispatcher and moving to California, I had even more time to dedicate to my education. I even started applying some of the things I was learning to my everyday life.

Fast forward to today. I’ve just started my final term with OSU and I have that feeling of accomplishment back that I felt after my first “Hello World!” program. I’m eager to get started on my capstone project and to learn as much as I can over these next ten weeks. I know it won’t be easy but I’m excited for the journey. Stay tuned.