It feels surreal to be starting my Capstone project already. I felt so lost just a couple years ago when the world shut down for COVID-19, and now here I am… close to graduating with a whole new degree! But how did I get to this point? Well a little backstory about me…

I graduated back in 2019 with a Bachelor of Science majoring in Biology. I had originally intended on moving into either research or healthcare, but I was having trouble deciding on exactly what I wanted to do. Most jobs would require a graduate degree and I didn’t feel like spending that much more money on school if I wasn’t 100% sure the path was right. Once the pandemic shut things down I was left with more time to reflect and I realized that I wanted a job that involved problem-solving, even if it wasn’t biology related. My partner is a software engineer so I started asking them more and more questions about their job and was surprised by how interesting I found it.

At first I was hesitant about switching over to computer science, after all it was very different from anything else I’ve done before. I started by learning basic Python on my own. You know the drill:

print("Hello World")

I was surprised by how much I enjoyed learning Python. It felt like I was just doing little puzzles (and I love puzzles!) so I immediately started looking into programs and long story short I started at Oregon State University in June of 2020. Best decision I’ve ever made.

Similarly to how I’ve been learning programming languages throughout my program, I am also fascinated with real-life languages. I’m excited that post-graduation I’ll have more time to learn them! Currently I’m fluent in English (as you may have already guessed at this point) and can hold a conversation in Spanish. I’m not sure which language I’ll pick up next but right now I’m thinking about German, French, Tagalog, Japanese, and so many more. I’ll likely find somewhere I want to visit and then give myself two years to learn the language before I go there.

One last thing! My first post wouldn’t be complete without mentioning my puppy, Bowen. Back in September my partner and I adopted her and she takes up most of my free time these days. She’s eight months old now, but everyone assumes she’s older because she’s growing so fast! She’s a major scaredy cat (I guess she missed the memo about being a dog) but she’s still young and overcoming her fears. I long for the day that she realizes the recycling bins in my building are, in fact, not the boogeyman… If only I could use my coding skills to help:

scared_of_recycling_bins = False