Hi, my name is Zach. If all goes according to plan I’ll be finishing up my CS degree this June. I’m also taking CS 475 Parallel Programming and CS 464 Open Source Software this term. In addition to my work as a student, I work 20 hours per week as a software engineering intern at an aerospace company. My path to this internship actually illustrates a lot about my interests and journey into software development.
Like many students I’ve met in this program, I had an early interest in technology. I bought a few C++ books on video game development in middle school (that I cracked only a handful of times) and dabbled with HTML, CSS and Javascript in high school. However, I had broad academic interests and left for my first degree planning to teach high school English, spent the first few years studying Latin and Greek intending to be a professor teaching and studying Classical literature, and ended up graduating unsure of what I wanted to do next, but knowing that the academy wasn’t for me.
There were a lot of exciting developments in technology around that time. Tesla had just started selling its first mass market vehicle, the Model S, Felix Baumgartner fell from low Earth orbit at incredible speed, SpaceX was learning how to land rockets, and researchers at MIT were working on exciting new battery technologies. I worried I was missing out and flirted with the idea of changing majors, even taking physics and calculus during my final year, but ultimately decided to finish my first degree and see what I could find. I explored careers in nonprofits, education, and cultural resource management but found they weren’t the right fit and still felt a pull toward technical work.
The next turning point came several years later sitting on the side of the road with a broken down truck. After getting a tow back to my house, I started investigating to figure out what had happened. After a lot of sleuthing in manuals and online forums, I determined that the Mass Air Flow (MAF) sensor was malfunctioning and sending bad data to one of the onboard computers, which left me stranded. The fact that getting from point A to point B depended so much on a computer was simultaneously horrifying and fascinating to me. I decided to seek peace through understanding and pursue a career transition into software development. I wanted to gain insight into how the things around me worked, with a particular interest in how software interacts with physical systems, especially the ones we depend upon on a daily basis.
I started applying for internships after completing the algorithms course. While I cast a wide net, I targeted areas of the software industry where I could see myself working long term, including the automotive, aerospace, and nuclear industries. Fortunately for me, a local company designs, engineers, and manufactures small unmanned aerial vehicles. I applied, interviewed, and received an offer to come aboard as an intern in June 2022, worked full time until September 2022, and have worked 20 hours per week since then. It has been an incredible learning experience and my interest in cyber-physical systems in general and the aerospace sector specifically has only grown. I especially enjoy being able to work with and learn from engineers from other disciplines!
The projects I selected are a combination of personal interest, topics that are directly applicable to the work I do at my internship and hope to do in my career, and play to my technical experience (C++ is probably my strongest language). My top choices were (1) the Space Invaders emulator project, which I am interested in because of the low-level nature of the work in a domain I know very little about, (2) the Mobile Treasure Hunt project, which I am interested in because I am fascinated by geospatial technologies but don’t have much experience with using them to make software, and (3) the Real Time Operating System (RTOS) development project because I work with an RTOS at work and feel like building one from scratch would really help me understand it much better. We’ll see how it all turns out – I’m certainly open to working on other projects and plan to learn a lot technically and professionally regardless!
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