As a new semester starts, here comes the first post for the CS467 Capstone project. As an artist stares at a blank canvas, I am staring at my empty blog thinking about the topic of this post, and all I can think of is the infamous conversation between George and Jerry Seinfeld
Well, since it’s an assignment at the end of the day, it can not be entirely about nothing. Perhaps, similar to Jerry’s and George’s idea, I will tell you a little bit about my journey to a computer science degree.
The idea of studying CS wasn’t foreign to me. When I was in high school in Russia, I was part of the school’s informatics team and participated in school competitions(olympiads). Although I was far away from the typical high schooler description that’s interested in computer science from Reddit or the description of a typical Russian hacker for that matter.
Soon after moving to the US, I discovered my passion for art, and at the time, it was a natural choice for me to go study interior design and architecture. In my mind, it was a perfect combination of art and science.
As time went on, I graduated and moved to NYC to pursue an interior design career. That’s when I realized the importance of technology in the architecture and design field and in what areas it was lacking.
I started exploring some of the tools like scripting to help improve my company’s daily workflow, but the more I worked with the technology the more I became interested in learning about it and about computer science in general. As I continued the research of the subject matter, I came across computation design that combines topics of CS and architecture. However, it was a new field that was available at a few universities, and it felt too specialized. Sure, I could have learned how to write programs to generate facade options or analyze building wind loads or do energy analysis, but what I was really interested in was how technology can affect everyday architects and designers.
With that goal in mind, I pivoted into looking at computer science degrees and that’s when I discovered OSU.
Through my time at OSU I continued to work as an interior designer and ironically enough the architectural project that I was working on while studying CS was a design of 3 floors for Jane Street Capital, one of the New York trading firms known for their innovative technology. Furthermore, the new grad job that I will start in August of this year is in the same company as one of my first interior design projects I worked on as an intern.
Call it the universe, or do we live in a matrix?!..
Well, I will stick with Seinfeld references for this post, and maybe cover matrices in the next one!
“You know, I used to think that the universe is a random, chaotic, sequence of meaningless events, but I see now that there is reason and purpose to all things.”
Jerry Seinfeld
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