Wanted to just do a stream of consciousness post about what led me to Computer Science.
My first degree was Bioengineering but I have always been interested in programming. In fact one of my main memories from college was from my freshman year, alone in my dorm looking at the course catalog for the Computer Science program and the Bioengineering program. Flipping back and forth, trying to think of the future career paths. Ultimately, I felt Bioengineering could open more doors for me to directly help people. Perhaps I would go to medical school, or go and build prosthetic limbs, or go to graduate school and nudge the field of tissue engineering slightly further. So I stuck to what I signed up for, a lot of undergrads switch majors but I felt computer science would be a cop out of my lofty goals. I would more than likely wind up at a tech company programming things that may or may not help people (or may or may not hurt people). Bioengineering seemed to have a more direct path towards my benevolent goals; in hindsight it was foolish and a bit innocent. Part of me regrets not switching to CS initially but I understand why I didn’t then.
From around the age of 10 or 11 I wanted to be able to make computers do things I wanted them to do. Before that I was into electronics. I had one of those 100 circuits in 1 boards that really got me into engineering, and before that I had tons of books about science experiments you could do at home. But it was programming that got me excited about engineering.
I come from a humble family. We had dial up internet until I was well into college and I didn’t have a computer of my own until I could afford one from working during summers. So in middle school when I first learned how video games were made I desperately wanted to learn about what this programming thing was all about. Luckily my dad knew a bit and told me the old computer in the attic might have a Q-Basic compiler on it. I had no idea what that meant but soon after he showed me I was hooked. He had a game called Gorillas on it and was able to show me the source code.
The source code might as well be gibberish to me. I tried to understand it but simply could not. But I had a great time slowly breaking things and soon wanted more. I went to the library and ordered the only book on Q basic I could find. I think it had to come from a library somewhere else in California. But it had everything I needed. I remember typing out line by line source code that displayed a ship on the ocean. The background waves were animated giving the illusion of movement. When I finally got it running I felt good for a moment until I realized I had no idea how it worked. So I read the book and tried hard to understand what it was saying.
This was during winter break and I had family visit. My cousin’s boyfriend was a mechanical engineering student at Cal Poly SLO. He saw me reading the book and laughed, “What are you reading that ancient book for? Nobody uses Q basic anymore. You might learn bad habits. You should learn C++.” He didn’t mean ill will but for some reason that shook me. I felt I was wasting time, I didn’t want to learn something already outdated. So I put the book down. I tried to figure out how to write C++ programs but I couldn’t download the tools necessary. So I put programming on the back burner for awhile.
I eventually got a laptop and was able to go to my friends house who had wifi to download the tools I would need to start programming again. At the time the internet was raving about Python so that’s what I started with. I built a one monster file game that had a wizard walk around and shoot fireballs at enemies. I was proud of my work until I showed it to my computer programmer wiz friend who said my code was garbage (it was) and python was a bad language to learn because it wasn’t OOP focused. This demotivated me again, I tried to learn C++ but around this time I also learned about bioengineering. Biology has always captivated me and hearing how people were saying bioengineering would bring about another technological boom similar to the computer piqued my interest.
College was only a year away and I was fully hooked on bioengineering. The field of bioinformatics also used python so it seemed to be a perfect fit. I enjoyed my time learning bioengineering but it was too large and too new a field so when I graduated I was not prepared for anything more than a laboratory technician job. I was also burntout from school and just wanted to make some amount of money. Thinking I would go back to school within a year.
Well it’s been a bit longer than that and I am glad to be back. Despite initial setbacks and missteps it’s good to be on a path towards a hopefully fulfilling future.
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