Blog Post #1: A Brief Introduction

Welcome to the first post of my capstone blog! My name is Asa Crimin and I am very excited to start the final chapter of my journey here at Oregon State. The goal of this whole blog is to document the process of creating this capstone project from start to finish. I think that the first step of doing that for me is to do some reflection as to how I got here, and to think about what I want to get our of this capstone project.

I’ll be breaking this post into three different parts, all guided by the following questions: Why did you choose to go into Computer Science? What do you hope to learn from the course? What do you hope to learn from your project? I’m using these specific questions for two reasons

I need to use these questions for the blog post #1 assignment (shocking I know)

These questions are the best for doing the reflection I want to do, as well as also being the best ways for me to express my mindset going into this project for whoever may end up reading this blog.

You may say “Hey Asa, couldn’t you have broken that up into three reasons instead of two?” and to that I would say, yes I could have, but it’s too late now so lets press forward!

Why did you choose to go into Computer Science?

What a long strange trip it’s been to say the least. It started all the way back in 2015, when I enrolled and got accepted to OSU for my first undergrad degree. My first major at OSU was actually computer science and I was enjoying it initially. However, like many freshman coming to the realization that what I do in college is actually going to have a major impact on the rest of the lives, I began to think about how I wanted to rest of my life to be. I decided then that I wanted my work to be something I was truly passionate about, and since I wasn’t feeling computer science around two terms in, I left the program for a new major.

At this point I was really into fitness so I decided that Kinesiology would be the best option for me to explore that more. During that program I took a course on sports psychology, fell in love with the psychology major, and made a full swap to a pure psychology course load. I would end up graduating in June 2019 with a psychology degree, and would start working at a family medicine clinic in August of that same year. A few months after that COVID hit and we all know what that was like so I’ll spare the details. Long story short, the medical field in a pandemic was not fun, and I left in 2021 to reevaluate my life and what I wanted from it.

After a few months, I found out about this program and had to go back to what I thought in 2019. With newly founded work experience, I asked myself what I wanted from my career. At that moment, I decided the change my beliefs. It didn’t matter if what I was working on was something I was passionate about, I wanted to work a career that would allow me to have the freedom to do things I was passionate about outside of work. With that change in mindset, I decided to enroll in the computer science post-bacc program at Oregon State and change the direction of my career.

I was nervous my feelings about computer science wouldn’t have changed since 2015 when I last studied it, but that turned out to not be the case. Every term in this program, my passion and excitement about computer science and the technology it influences has grown because the more I study, the more I realize I don’t understand and want to learn even more. It’s a vicious and never ending cycle that I’m so happy to be stuck in. Now that I’m at the end of my journey, I’m a little sad that I won’t have the structure of a program like this, but I know I’ll never stop wanting to learn more about this amazing field.

Now that we have my entire computer science history out of the way, lets get into a brief discussion of the capstone course, project, and what it means for me.

What do you hope to learn from the course?

With this being one of my last courses from this program, I want to use it as a test to see how far I’ve come. The capstone is unique in the sense that it’s going to allow me to test all I’ve learned in this program, as well as allow me to test how good I am at learning on my own. There will be aspects to this class that I will likely have never touched in the program, so I’m excited to see how I adapt to them and test how fast I can learn new skills while working on the project.

Beyond that, I’m excited to get more experience working in a group on a software development project. The program does have some classes where group work is required, but not too many with group work on the scale of an entire software development cycle. I think I have a really great group for this project so I hope to be able to take my experience working with them in this class to a career in the near future.

What do you hope to learn from your project?

We just got our project today and I’m super excited to work on it! We are going to create a web or mobile version of a board game that teaches about climate change. I’m very grateful I get to work on a project that addresses a serious issue we face as a society because it motivates me to produce an even better product beyond the base requirements given to us. We first need to troubleshoot the game to make sure it’s fun, then we need to convert it to a website or a phone app. There a two major things I want to learn more about while working on this project, game development and web development/app development. As a self proclaimed gamer, any opportunity to develop a game is one I want to jump on right away. I have experience in web development, but I don’t have any in mobile app development. Our group still needs to discuss which direction we want to take this, but I’d be very happy either improving my web development skills or taking the opportunity to learn some mobile app development!

Overall I’m very excited for this capstone class and project. I feel like this class marks the end of an almost 8 year journey to get to this point. From leaving the major in 2015, to completing it in 2023, I’ve learned a lot about myself and what I want from the career I’m trying to develop. This class and project are an opportunity to put everything I’ve learned to the test, and to learn more along the way. The posts from here will likely be a bit more technical and focused on the project itself, so I’m glad I got to take the time to reflect, remind myself of how far I’ev come, and prepare to get the most out of this capstone alongside my teammates.

See you in the next post!