Hello and thank you for taking the time to read my blog!\u00a0 My name is Chris Smith and I live in Colorado Springs, CO with my wife and our 2 Shiba Inus.\u00a0 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. \u00a0\u00a0So how and why did I choose to go back to school and learn to code?\u00a0 Well, let\u2019s go back to 2019.<\/p>\n
At that time, I was working as a Production Engineer with a high volume metal manufacturing company in Los Angeles, CA.\u00a0 In this role, I did some mechanical design work, resolved issues on the production floor, and made improvements to manufacturing processes.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 I was starting to have real regrets about my career choice.\u00a0 I was unhappy and I knew I needed to do something else, but what?\u00a0 I had always been interested in learning to code but I didn\u2019t know where to start and, frankly, I thought it was too late to start.<\/p>\n
Then one day I was sitting at my desk, doing a work related task that was very tedious and repetitive.\u00a0 I thought \u2018surely<\/strong> there must be a better way to do this.\u2019<\/em>\u00a0 And I knew immediately the answer was to write a script.\u00a0 But where to start? \u00a0What language do I use?\u00a0 What program do I write it in?\u00a0 What even is a script??\u00a0 Well, after some googling on my lunch break, I was fairly confident the answer was to open Notepad and write something in Visual Basic.\u00a0 Fast forward a couple weeks and many, many google searches later and I actually had a working script!\u00a0 I demonstrated it to my supervisor and pretty soon he had everyone in our department running the script on their computers.<\/p>\n I felt a renewed sense of purpose and motivation for my job.\u00a0 If I could automate this task, why couldn\u2019t I automate that task? \u00a0And this other one too?\u00a0 I loved coming up with ideas, finding a solution, and implementing it through code.\u00a0 Pretty soon, I had written several scripts that had a massive impact on how our department operated.\u00a0 Without the burden of daily, time consuming tasks, our engineers had much more time to work on meaningful projects.<\/p>\n I looked forward to going to work again and found real satisfaction in contributing to my department through coding.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 I quit a few months later, got a part time job, and started taking classes at Oregon State.<\/p>\n Going back to school is one of the hardest things I\u2019ve ever done in my life.\u00a0 The fear of failure, the uncertainty of the future, and leaving a career behind is a lot to take on mentally.\u00a0 But with each class I\u2019ve 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Hello and thank you for taking the time to read my blog!\u00a0 My name is Chris Smith and I live in Colorado Springs, CO with my wife and our 2 Shiba Inus.\u00a0 I am currently enrolled in my last quarter of classes (woohoo!) at OSU and I am so excited to start my new career … Continue reading My Path to CS<\/span>