Hi everyone! I am a second-career computer science student living in British Columbia who previously spent the better part of a decade in the engineering consulting industry. That work involved a lot of road/bridge design, project management, stakeholder relations, and the like. Not that this wasn’t valuable work, but after that length of time I just felt that it wasn’t quite for me anymore. I have always been interested in PC hardware, RaspberryPi, and how exciting the ever-changing nature of the technology industry is. In other words, when I got home at the end of the day I would much rather read the latest AnandTech computer hardware news than “Asphalt Monthly.” This led to me deciding to take the 2 years and do a career change to CS.
Now that I am nearing the end of the program, I couldn’t be happier with my decision and wish I would have done this 10 years ago. The breadth this program exposes you to is great and I have especially liked the lower-level material like C, Assembly, and Operating Systems. I also really enjoyed the full-stack web work with MySQL, React, and Express, and feel that I got great resume pieces out of those classes. I have been working with PyTorch and custom image recognition networks in my own time and am glad that this program has given me the foundational knowledge to make some projects I can be proud of.
I’d like to find a career that focuses on security, big data, data science, and a degree of ML. I love working in teams and that feeling of a big project coming together when everyone chips in. That being said, I also really enjoyed React and web development so there isn’t a whole lot I wouldn’t be happy doing going forward. I’ll be living in a very small town in coastal BC come winter so I’ll likely exclusively be looking for remote work.
I’ll be finishing up this fall without any internship experience, though I am hoping my previous engineering experience will count for something. This term will be quite busy for me with Capstone, Cloud Computing, job applications, interviews, getting married, moving to a different part of BC, and probably a few more things! When I’m not doing school, I enjoy road cycling, photography, scuba diving, reading science fiction (just finished the 3 Body Problem trilogy), and gardening.
Looking forward to meeting everyone and making some awesome projects! Here’s my LinkedIn if anyone wants to connect: Myles Penner | LinkedIn.
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