My name is Diane and I’m a UC Davis graduate and computer science student at Oregon State University. My combined interests in the life sciences and technology naturally led me to where I am today – studying computer science, contributing to open source, and constantly learning.
I’ve always been interested in software and web development, even when I didn’t know what software and web development was. Let me explain. My gateway to coding was editing my Neopets and Myspace profile, but I really didn’t know I was touching code or knew anything about computer science. I would search how to use HTML and CSS to edit my profiles because I wanted my profile to look a certain way. I even created a Myspace that had a bunch of templates for people to copy and paste what I made onto their profile. That was a suppressed 8th grade memory that became unlocked as I was typing this out.
Fast-forward to college. I was in a biology scholars program and part of the two year program included doing academic research. We had to cold email professors asking if there was space in their lab to take an on undergraduate. By sheer luck I found a professor doing computational biology research on designing 3D proteins. With no programming background, I emailed the professor, and my next 3 years were spent working in that lab. I was convinced pharmacy and professional school was my next steps. After graduating, I spent the next year working on my applications and working as a pharmacy technician. I found that being a pharmacy technician was fun, but a career as a pharmacist was not for me.
That’s where OSU comes in. I started scripting in college, but it was after college and taking computer science classes at my local community college that allowed me to truly enjoy and start programming.
I’m very excited to be taking my last two classes at OSU, the Capstone course and Cloud App Development, because they’re two project-focused classes where I know I’m going to be learning a ton! Even as I’m finishing up my degree, it really is just the beginning, as corny as that sounds.
My future posts will be about what is revolving around my life: enjoying and experiencing the last 3 months as a computer science undergrad, focusing on finishing my two classes strong, building projects I will be proud of, figuring out what type of software engineer I want to be, interview prepping by practicing Leetcode, going to career fairs and conferences (Grace Hopper just finished!), contributing to open source (Hello Hacktober!) and so much more. Stay tuned!
