What’s going on?
This last week has been more uneventful than I would like. My team and I are now sitting here at the start of week 3 without having met our Project Coordinator. While, we do have some to go on thanks to the project site we are missing a large understanding of the project architecture and what sort of data we’ll be processing. This leaves us at a precarious point with the assignment “Project Plan” due tonight. However, we will have a meeting with our project coordinator tonight, so hopefully this will give us enough time to create what is needed for CS 467. In the meantime, I have created an interesting concept of what our project might look like in a tool called Figma. This is a command-line interface prototype. Check it out here.
Fig. 1 – Launch screen – command-line interface concept
However, despite the hiccups in our project so far, we have made enormous progress towards group coordination. I have a great feeling that all of my project partners are willing to move forward and be proactive towards our end goal. Hopefully this feeling remains for the remainder of the semester. That’s about as much of an update I can do regarding our project thus far.
What’s next?
What I would consider a more productive exercise, though, is to look at what lies ahead of me. I am making a large career change, in the hopes that this investment into myself will yield some sort of return. Will I be able to get a job after I graduate? These words definitely fill me with anxiety as I look towards the future. My first bachelor’s degree was in Biology from Purdue University. I chose to pursue a Marine Biology career with an emphasis on Ecology/Wildlife. I wanted to take care of and study animal life-cycles. However, this did not come to fruition, I bounced along the West Coast of the United States and ended up here in Oregon. Looking for more in my career I looked towards education, and I decided to follow another passion of mine, computers.
Now as I sit here in my last semester at Oregon State University. Having done as well as I could, (I worked my ass off for a 3.92 GPA, not that it matters lol) I look off towards my future with excitement and anxiety. I’m a bit overwhelmed by the space ahead of me, but I’ve decided that instead of specializing in a single area of computer science, I’m going to double down on the fundamentals (algorithms, data structures). Will this pay off? I have no idea, but I can’t imagine this to be a bad play. Algorithms and data structures lay the groundwork of good code (along with “Clean Code” habits) and I can imagine I’ll be able to get a job in many places with these fundamentals.
So what’s next?
I know I need to get my Resume, LinkedIn, and portfolio organized. And I need to start applying ASAP. I’m working on each of these items, albeit slower than I’d like. But from what I’ve learned, I’m not so worried about the interview process, but rather getting the interview in the first place. So here’s to my next step!
That’s one small step,
Robert Behring
