What got me started.

I have always fashioned myself as someone who has had an eye towards technology and an eagerness to mess around and tinker with that technology. As with a lot of people my age, I started by manipulating MySpace source code so that I could change fonts and background colors on my personal page. From there, I put my “coding career” on hold until years later when I landed a job as an electrical engineering technician.

As an EE technician, everyday I would play around with different types of robotics or PLC’s. I soon found myself wanting to make my own (much more simple) robots and it seemed the perfect introductory way to go about that was buy getting myself an Arduino. 

The community around Arduino boards is vast and very helpful. Just about anything you can think of making is possible and the tutorials are excellent. In no time I was able to get working robots up and running. As I progressed with my projects, I started looking at the source code just like I did back in the MySpace days. I learned that everything was running off C++ code – something I didn’t have the slightest inclination about. Regardless, I found myself tinkering with the code without any real idea of what I was doing. I would turn to C++ tutorials online for help, but felt I needed more structure and guidance to really progress and wrap my head around what I was looking at. Because of that, I had a busy enough life as it was so I put those projects on the back-burner but the possibilities of what I could do never really left my mind.

Fast forward a few years later and I decided I wanted to take the plunge from the hardware side of robotics and building-out PLC’s to the software side. I did some research online and being that I had a degree in business already, it seemed OSU’s program provided me the best option to take that dream and turn it into a reality with their post-bacc program. 

That decision is one of the best moves that I’ve made. Now my eyes are open to a whole new world of what is possible through computer science and software development. Before, I was strictly focused on what it took to program robots or PLC’s. Now, I have a deep interest in everything from cyber security to app/web development to A.I..

I’m excited to see what the future holds and am happy I was able to find a field that is interesting and fun at the same time!