My journey into Computer Science is a long, winding road from the start of college to today. While I never thought I would enter computer science, a few key events in my life occurred which got me here. From learning my first software language, to a lucky internship, and finally to the onset of COVID, the path to get here wasn’t all that obvious.
When I began undergrad, I entered straight into the Mechanical Engineering program here at OSU. I enjoyed all that I was learning, but of course couldn’t tell how fun the major itself would be later on. I was taking math and physics and other core classes, and while I enjoyed them, they only told me I was heading in the right direction, not exactly in the right spot. At the end of freshman year, I took the MATLAB class, and fell in love with coding. As I ventured deeper into college, I knew I wanted to incorporate software into my career eventually, but wasn’t yet sure how that would happen. However, the software bug was inside me, and wasn’t headed anywhere.
At the end of my sophomore year, a colleague of my father approached me with an internship offer. It was a big data engineer role; very outside my scope of understanding. I didn’t know anything about Python, and had never even heard of some of the other tools I was supposed to know such as SQL. Talk about imposter syndrome. The learning curve was the steepest I’ve ever experienced throughout that internship, and it was still to this day the most rewarding three months of my professional life. I knew now software would play more than just part of what I wanted to do with my career; I wanted it to be all of what I did. However, being at the end of my second year, I faced the difficult predicament of switching majors and adding a year, or putting my head down through Mechanical Engineering and trying to get a software role after graduating.
I went with the Mechanical route, and was confident I could get where I wanted to go with it. Right up until COVID shut down the country three months before I graduated, and plummeted my qualifications as a software engineer. Faced with a lot of difficulty finding a job, I enrolled into the Computer Science program when I earned my first Bachelors. Now, a year later, I am one class away from being a full fledged Software engineer, and all the happier for it.
While my road to Computer Science was long and far more curvy than I would have wished, I am more than excited to be where I am today. Luck or fate, I think I’ve found the thing that scratches that itch that made me want to be an Engineer in the first place. And I am stoked to see where it takes me next.
