Senior Year as a CS Major

The end of Winter term is here! My group has made a ton of headway into our project and we just have one term to go to finish it up. That will mean graduation for me and moving on to my overseas internship the weekend of graduation. A lot of big changes but I’m prepared to tackle them!

Over this term I learned a lot and did a lot. We have essentially completed the MVP of our product, resulting in an alpha version that has all of the functionality we were looking to implement.

What was the most difficult challenge, and how did you solve it?

My functional work for this term was split into three different major requirements: reproduction, death, and the energy cycle (which is intertwined with predation as part of death). These were each challenging in their own way, but for me from the perspective of managing the organisms, the energy cycle was the most challenging. This involved a lot of research into real-life energy cycles for both plants and animals, because our product is intended to be an educational tool to learn about biological processes of evolution. Since our work needed to reflect reality in this way, it involved a lot of learning about these processes, which I had some small knowledge of from introductory biology classwork, but I didn’t know the intricacies or the actual numbers/percentages of energy consumption, storage, and loss. I was able to implement a framework for this and fill it with numbers based on my research. To some extent, because this is just a simulation and we have not implemented every intricacy of energy usage for every kind of organism, I did have to make some decisions about the ways energy would be impacted by the traits that we implemented. Ultimately, the numbers are changing and will probably continue to change over the next term as we add in additional factors from our stretch goals, because this is such an important base for a lot of the simulation requirements.

Ultimately, I’m very happy with all of my work this term, and I feel great about having gone through the learning process to be able to implement functionality the way I envisioned from the start. I’m really looking forward to continuing to finetune our work and add in new elements to create a great finished product by the end of the school year.