OSU has granted us all a wonderful opportunity to pursue a different direction than we at least initially thought. Whether it is right after our first degree or more like me after several years in a different industry. Either way, our paths to Computer Science all differ and contain different bends and forks compared to the rest.
My Path
Early on into thinking about my career I was interested in Computer Science, yet I forked early away from it. In my sophomore year of high school I took a web development course where we learned HTML, CSS, and PHP. This was before the HTML5 changes but I took it on pretty quickly. My teacher at the time ran a consulting web development company and invited me to “intern” in the summer. This consisted of revamping our districts school websites and work on a paid project for a big carwash chain that was new to our town. Overall, I got paid to write some basic HTML, CSS, and PHP and learn a whole lot that summer. Unfortunately, this was during a time I was more focused on friends and fun so it kind of put it in a bad light to me. I decided that I didn’t want to pursue Computer Science anymore because I wanted a career where I wasn’t typing all day and I could be more hands on. This led me to pursuing Chemical Engineering which was awesome. I made several life friends, connections, and memories while pursuing this degree and working in the Semiconductors industry. As my time has gone on though, engineering became more and more data oriented and I’ve found myself gravitating towards the programming parts of my job, utilizing it wherever I could. I found myself ignoring my day to day activities to work on the next greatest script I could write to improve our job. Now this got me a lot of recognition and more work in my position, but also pushed me to start pursuing this second degree.
My path was initially set to continue following these normal engineering applications, but as I’ve worked through the degree and pursued side projects I have gravitated more and more towards software engineering. It no longer satisfies me to write a new script or create a new data frame for reporting, I want to build applications! This is where my path forked once again and I’ve pursued opportunities outside of my team in Software Engineering. I’m now determined to make the switch from Chemical Engineering altogether and join a Software Engineering team as soon as I graduate this December!
Now if any of you have connections or opportunities, I’m looking for work… 😀
