Who am i?
Hello! I am Joseph/Joe/Joda, and I am a 25 year old computer science student at Oregon State University and I also work as a Research Data Analyst in a Neurocomputational research lab at Stanford University that utilizes machine learning and artificial intelligence to analyze 3D brain scans.
Before all of this I started out as an aerospace engineer, then became an investment advisor with a business degree, and by some strange turn in the web of fate I am now living in the Bay Area with my life revolving around computers.
Why did i choose to go into computer science?
I have had quite a few different ideas for what I wanted to do with my life, which was essentially just based on whatever I found interesting at the time. Unfortunately, it took me quite a while to find an interest that stuck for more than a year. Whether it was aerospace engineering, cognitive science, business, finance, etc. I found that each of these paths limited the amount that I could combine problem solving with creative freedom. Finally I found Computer Science and all the magical opportunities that lie under the giant umbrella that is CS. I love the fact that a single subject has such a wide breadth and depth of applications, and I have been a passionate learner for roughly 3 years now. Accordingly, there is always something new to learn and has kept me wanting more. I feel oddly reassured that I have spent so much time and effort to learn all things that CS has to offer and know that I have barely scratched the surface.
What are my current goals?
I feel that it doesn’t make much sense to talk further about my what’s and why’s without first discussing my primary driving reasons behind them. I am a large proponent of goal setting, and in this opinion I am a recent convert. I used to despise having to come up with personal goals because I didn’t feel that I had any singular things that I could pin down as goals that I wanted to achieve. However, now I am of the opinion that I didn’t like goal setting because I didn’t have any goals; crazy how that works.
There were obviously things that I wanted to accomplish (graduate, go outside and touch grass one day, etc.), but I think that there is a distinction between the two ideas. The biggest thing that turned my ‘want to accomplish’ into ‘goals’ was simply setting a timeline. Stuff starts to get really real really fast once you have to start figuring out how much time it would realistically take to get something done, and then in the process you come up with a long list of actionable steps that turn into your milestone goals.
So enough of my diatribe about converting to goal-orientevism. My current goal that is relevant to the topic of this blog is that I want to be working as a full time engineer on a project that I am passionate about and interested in by the end of 2024.
What do i hope to learn from this course?
So, where does this course fit into all of this big picture talk of me as a person? Well, firstly this is my capstone project in my final quarter, so I want to utilize this opportunity to tie many of the things that I have learned throughout my time in the program. This serves a dual purpose of making sure that I understand the concepts of what I have learned to the extent that I can apply them, while also hopefully building something interesting enough to show off a bit.
Secondly, I hope to get the opportunity to build a product in something that I am not experienced in making already, I want to build something new to me. I think this course poses an excellent opportunity to learn more about a technology that I don’t have a firm grasp on yet.
Lastly, I look forward to the opportunity to become a better teammate in a development team of peers. At work, I am the low man on the totem pole with all my coworkers who are far more experienced and knowledgeable than I am. So I know that I have a lot to learn when it comes to working on a development team where we are all equals in a broad sense.
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