Today I’d like to share about my journey at Oregon State University. While I started this post-bachelor program in the fall of 2019, it almost felt like it was yesterday when I was deciding what my future career was going to be. During this time I had finished my bachelor’s in history from Portland State University and was working at a law firm as the office admin. The work there was mundane at best as most of the work was either reviewing stacks of legal documents or archiving and maintaining them in a database. My choices of advancing my career were either I apply for law school or pursue a Ph.D. in history, both of which lacked the flexibility that I wanted in a career since both a law degree or a Ph.D. in history meant that I’d have a very specialized skill set for specific types of jobs. Around this time was when I was talking to a friend and he mentioned that OSU offered a post-bachelor program for computer science. While I’ve always been interested in computer science, I quickly realized the flexibility of pursuing such a degree and how it could be applied to any field. For instance, databases are a much-needed tool within any professional field whether that is in academia or at a law firm as files and documents need to be stored and protected well. Other uses were making video games that mimic the world we see or model sets that can be used to test grand theories. Skills sets in computer science can be easily tailored for data science as programs can be modeled to describe big and small data. For all of these reasons I then decided to pursue computer science at OSU and never looked back.
