“Computers are hard”, I told myself, blindly blocking myself from choosing anything computer-science-related as my initial undergraduate degree. All I knew was that I wanted to build things, and I thought mechanical or aerospace engineering would scratch that itch. Fast forward to 7 years later, I was working as an aerospace engineer. Midway through the pandemic, I decided that learning Python could help me automate a lot of the repetitive tasks that I ran into on the job. From there, my curiosity piqued. I learned that computers can indeed be hard, but I loved solving the types of problems that revolved around computers. Not only that, but I loved building software. This led me to look into returning to school, and in the fall of 2021, I began my second undergraduate degree, shooting for a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science at Oregon State University (OSU).
OSU provided me with so many opportunities to learn, and I’m especially grateful for classes like CS271 (Computer Architecture and Assembly Language) and CS261 (Data Structures) for really diving deep into the fundamentals. My favorite courses so far have been CS344 (now CS374, Operating Systems 1) and CS372 (Intro to Networks). These courses opened my eyes – CS344 showed me UNIX, vim, and shell scripting, all the while introducing the underlying concepts involved in an operating system. CS372 unveiled to me the modern engineering marvel that is the Internet as we know it. I now truly appreciate how easy it is to video chat with someone halfway across the world.
While taking these courses, I discovered an interest in full-stack and mobile app development. On the side, I started developing a website with a friend of mine. This past summer, I was able to land a software engineering internship with Pinterest, where I was able to work on their Android app. Both of these situations have shown me that you can never stop learning while working around computers. There are always new problems to solve, and although computers might be hard, that doesn’t mean they aren’t invigorating to work on!
I’m looking forward to this capstone course and the project my team and me will be working on – nothing can beat looking back on your hard work after a few months. I can’t wait to see what we’ll learn along the way.
