Hello and thank you for taking the time to read my blog!  My name is Chris Smith and I live in Colorado Springs, CO with my wife and our 2 Shiba Inus.  I am currently enrolled in my last quarter of classes (woohoo!) at OSU and I am so excited to start my new career in CS.   So how and why did I choose to go back to school and learn to code?  Well, let’s go back to 2019.

At that time, I was working as a Production Engineer with a high volume metal manufacturing company in Los Angeles, CA.  In this role, I did some mechanical design work, resolved issues on the production floor, and made improvements to manufacturing processes.  I enjoyed certain aspects of my job and I worked with a great team of people, but it never really felt like a great fit for me.  I was starting to have real regrets about my career choice.  I was unhappy and I knew I needed to do something else, but what?  I had always been interested in learning to code but I didn’t know where to start and, frankly, I thought it was too late to start.

Then one day I was sitting at my desk, doing a work related task that was very tedious and repetitive.  I thought ‘surely there must be a better way to do this.’  And I knew immediately the answer was to write a script.  But where to start?  What language do I use?  What program do I write it in?  What even is a script??  Well, after some googling on my lunch break, I was fairly confident the answer was to open Notepad and write something in Visual Basic.  Fast forward a couple weeks and many, many google searches later and I actually had a working script!  I demonstrated it to my supervisor and pretty soon he had everyone in our department running the script on their computers.

I felt a renewed sense of purpose and motivation for my job.  If I could automate this task, why couldn’t I automate that task?  And this other one too?  I loved coming up with ideas, finding a solution, and implementing it through code.  Pretty soon, I had written several scripts that had a massive impact on how our department operated.  Without the burden of daily, time consuming tasks, our engineers had much more time to work on meaningful projects.

I looked forward to going to work again and found real satisfaction in contributing to my department through coding.  However, rather than making me want to stay at that job, I knew with all my heart that I needed to leave and pursue a career in Computer Science.  I quit a few months later, got a part time job, and started taking classes at Oregon State.

Going back to school is one of the hardest things I’ve ever done in my life.  The fear of failure, the uncertainty of the future, and leaving a career behind is a lot to take on mentally.  But with each class I’ve taken, I have become more excited about starting my next chapter in life and I am more confident than ever that I made the right choice.