CS 467 Blog

We all have to start somewhere, right? I never expected to get into computer science. In fact, my parents explicitly told me as a child that it was a career path which would lead me to ruin, one which had reached its peak and would decline with time. This is the story of the tumultuous journey which eventually led me to pursue a computer science degree at the unusual age of thirty-five years old.

My father was an electrical engineer. He was incredibly clever, but strangely didn’t actually know much about computers. I remember waltzing into his office and borrowing-without-asking an unread book titled How Computers Work. It was obtuse and all but impossible for tiny me to digest, but I loved seeing all the diagrams and reading explanations of how things connected to make a functional computer.

Our first computer was a 386. Looking back, it’s a bit fascinating that younger me knew more about navigating a command prompt than even the me of a few years ago. It was a clunky old thing which took ages to load anything and lacked any of the quality of life you’d see today, but it was also the greatest thing young me had ever laid eyes upon. I loved playing games like some DOS-based baseball game, and it was so difficult to tear me away from it that I even learned Lotus 1-2-3 as a child to get to use it more whenever my family wanted to spreadsheet something.

In my teens, I ended up at a summer camp on a whim. I learned a bit of HTML and Flash, and the program led me to create my own website to host my own Flash game. It wasn’t anything spectacular. In fact, it was probably some awful Geocities hosted monstrosity! I was really proud of it at the time though. I loved Flash games at the time, spending much of my free time at summer camp on Newgrounds or similar pages instead of going outside to do what I considered much more mundane activities.

By my senior year of high school, it was finally time to make a decision. What exactly did I want to do with my life? As with many people that age, I could hardly decide what I wanted to eat for breakfast, let alone choose a career path. I loved computers and spent most of my day enjoying their company, but was it something through which I could launch a career? I had been doing some volunteer work for an unofficial school website, managing the forums and writing study guides, but anything involving programming was left to the higherups. Even so, the answer to my question should have obviously been a resounding yes, but good luck explaining that to the me who went to pharmacy school instead! My mother had just been through a rather rough surgery, and I shortsightedly decided to stay closer to home and try something which would make her a bit happier.

Honestly, how silly do you have to be to pay thousands of dollars to study something you don’t even really like that much? I made it through with a B.S. Biochemistry in about five years, but I very rapidly decided I would rather get into the family business than pursue higher education. I picked up a real estate license of all things and started working in property management. It wasn’t exciting, but it gave me a chance to finally get the things I needed: time to reflect on my life and money to decide what I wanted to do with it from here.

I was going to get into computer science, and nobody was going to stop me. Well, maybe I was going to stop me. I was 32 years old, and I hardly knew anything compared to my younger peers. I wanted to become a developer and possibly get into mobile app/game design, but how exactly was I going to go about such a massive shift in my life? I did a bit of research and happened upon OSU’s second degree program. This was the kind of start I felt like I needed, especially with how limited a background I had heading into it. I signed up immediately and began looking for online resources. I consumed free courses such as Harvard’s CS 50 and went through as many programming puzzles as I could to attempt to catch up. I had found my passion, and I was going to dedicate myself to seeing it through.

It’s been about two years since then. I have two courses and the capstone project left to complete, at which point my journey will both end and begin anew. It was a journey since my childhood which led me through numerous professions before finally arriving at that which I had always loved the most all along, and it will be a journey which will lead me into building a career in a field which I truly love.