Introduction
Hello everybody, my name is Brandon Nguyen. I am a third year computer science major here at OSU. I am currently living in Corvallis near campus but I have been taking a lot of online classes recently so I can have more freedom to travel between here and my home in Washington. Back home, I have two orange cats and two dogs (a big reason why I’ve been travelling home more frequently).
As far as hobbies go, I love to stay active. I try to work out and play as many different sports as I can. This past summer, I started to play a lot of volleyball. I would play nearly three to four times a week with some family-friends I recently connected with. I’m super bummed that the weather is starting to get gloomy but I’m excited to try out indoor volleyball and maybe some new activities.
While I spend a lot of time being active, I also love to be creative. My favorite art form being music. I started my music path with piano lessons when I was four years old. From then on I started to sing along to the car radio (I still love 2000-2010s pop) and interact with music every chance I got. I joined a dance studio when I turned seven and joined the middle choir in sixth grade. Choir was the one I stuck to the most. I even ended up being voted choir president in my senior year of high school!
Getting started with Computer Science
I started getting interested in computer science for many reasons that I ended up finding throughout my high school years. Like many in this field, I have been playing video games for all my life. I loved playing things like Skylanders and Minecraft as a kid and as I grew older I started wanting to make things like that myself. Throughout school, I always excelled in math and loved to challenge myself with strategy games and logic puzzles. When I got to high school and started getting my Associates degree through the Running Start program, I took a few computer classes and realized this is exactly what I had been training for my whole life! Many coding problems feel just like those puzzles to me and I have a lot of fun working things out.
As a Vietnamese Washingtonian interested in computer science, I really wanted to go to the University of Washington but I didn’t end up making it into their competitive computer science program. But I wasn’t too upset since I had been debating between UW and OSU since I had tons of friends that would be coming here with me. Once I got here and started taking real programming and software development classes, I only got more and more interested.
Moving forward with Computer Science
This past summer, I landed an internship with Washington Trust Bank where I work with a lot of Microsoft products to improve the processes in my sector of the bank. I had to learn Microsoft Excel and helped my team learn more about the Power platform with Automate and BI. I have been having a ton of fun learning something new on my own and being able to provide continuous improvements for my team and see their reactions. However, this is not exactly what I have in mind for my computer science career.
One worry I had regarding my computer science journey was how I am going to incorporate my creative interests into my career. As I started taking classes like networking and algorithms, sometimes I would get tired of the rigid structure of the material. But after looking through the projects options for my Senior Software Engineering Project course, I have a lot of hope for my future. All of the projects related to music and making games have brought my passion for computer science full circle. I am super excited for the year to come and I have regained a ton of confidence in my computer science decision.