This is the start of the capstone course and it’s insane to me how this is my final semester in the program. Like some of you in the in this post-baccalaureate program, I am studying here in hopes to make a career change myself. Currently, I am working as an Assistant Civil Engineer at the New York City Department of Transportation. While the field of Civil Engineering is interesting in it of itself, I realized I was more interested in software development when I started asking questions about how the CADD programs (i.e., CSiBridge, AutoCAD and STAAD.Pro) I was using were made and how new features and updates are pushed to the end users. I wanted basically to understand how I could make something like that if I ever was tasked with developing a program like this. This ultimately led to me applying for this post-baccalaureate program in hopes of gaining an answer to this question before I make the dive into this new career path.

Outside of my interest in the software used in my own workday, I also do have a love for video games and being in this program just made me interested in how I can make something like those as well. The more courses I took, the greater my interest became. After taking operating systems and parallel programming, I became interested in the inner workings of my own PC, specifically the rolls the CPU and GPU play in computing in general. Honestly, it makes me rather excited that I’m getting more curious about these topics, but at the same time it makes me nervous after realizing how vast this field is.

Now that I am nearing the home stretch, I want to use this capstone course to figure out what I want to do. I am still leaning more towards software development but considering there is so much I have yet to see, I don’t want to limit my options. Two projects I am considering as my picks are the HTML5 Multiplayer 2D Space Arcade Game and the A-life Challenge. They are both vastly different projects, but while the 2D space shooter would be something I would want to play and share with friends, the A-life Challenge sounds like something completely different from what I am used to seeing myself. I do ultimately hope to create something that I, and my future team, will be proud of.

Good luck everyone!

— Nelsyda