Ominous (and overly dramatic) title, I know. But it reflects how I feel coming to the end of my journey here at Oregon State University. I think for this first post, I just wanted to talk a little bit about how I got here and where I see myself headed in the near future.

My name is Xiao Yu but I go by Denny. I’m from the SF Bay Area and completed my first degree in Neurobiology, Physiology, and Behavior at UC Davis in 2018. The title is fancy but it’s essentially pre-med because I was planning on becoming a Physician Assistant upon graduation. After graduating, working as a medical scribe while completing an EMT licensing course, I realized how far I was from actually reaching the goal. I needed at least a thousand hours of clinical work just to apply to PA schools so even if I got in on the first round which was unlikely, I was at least 1.5 years away from starting a program and likely 4 or 5 away from completing one.

Over the course of my two years as a scribe, I had the opportunity to think about something I didn’t during my first degree. What did I want from a career? I enjoyed my job as a scribe but I couldn’t imagine myself in the shoes of the provider. People come in with the same set of problems, day-in and day-out and the reality I saw was that long-term problems are rarely solved, only alleviated. In 40 years from now, providers would likely still be seeing patients for the same things. People and their diseases don’t change; but technologies do.

I knew I had the aptitude for software engineering from several college-level programming courses (I had originally planned to minor in CS) but I couldn’t balance the time-consuming nature of CS projects with my original degree full of labs. Talking to some software engineers after graduation made me realize how great their quality of life was, which is something that has become increasingly important to me. I briefly considered attending a coding bootcamp back in 2019 but I reconsidered due to the (seeming) decline of hiring from bootcamps.

This eventually led me to where I am today, here at OSU where I’ve learned so much about computer science fundamentals such as computer architecture, data structures, and operating systems. In my final term, I am taking Cloud Development as well as Algorithms.

I am currently applying for full-time software developer roles and have an interview tomorrow morning so wish me luck! One day, I hope to integrate my experience with biology and healthcare with my rediscovered passion for tech. That’s why my preferred capstone is the 911 Response-Time Analysis application.

Here’s a link to the neuroprosthetic video which started it all for me:

(22) Thought control of robotic arms using the BrainGate system – YouTube