A (hopefully quick) introduction: My name is Patrick and as of writing this post I am a post-baccalaureate student at Oregon State University studying Computer Science. This is my last term before graduation, and I am taking my Capstone class to wrap things up.
Ever since I was pretty young, I’ve been interested in computers. Admittedly, most of this was probably due to video games and my early love for sci-fi like Star Wars. My friends and I would play little adventure games featuring different basic logic puzzles like Pajama Sam, the Put-Put series, and Spy Fox. From there it grew into games like Warcraft, Nintendo 64 games, and so on until this day.
My parents weren’t super tech savvy and mostly saw my time on the computer as time wasted, so as I got older and progressed through school, I was mostly pushed towards studying things like medicine and was never really introduced to programming in any way shape or form.
My freshman year of university my roommate was a Computer Science major who was from the Silicon Valley area. He already had a lot of experience and proceeded to graduate within 2 years. He introduced me to the types of stuff he was doing but I felt that I was too far behind to start even at 18. I proceeded to flounder through school while working and taking breaks for various reasons. Eventually I graduated with a degree in general studies with a management emphasis a whopping 10 years later.
I had gotten married in that time and had my daughter shortly after graduating. My first salaried job out of school was as a tech support “engineer” for a growing software company based in Utah working in real estate. The company was great, and I was paid well considering what my job title was but having a family of my own I ultimately decided I needed to go back to school in order to achieve the earning potential I needed for myself to support my family the way I wanted to. I had worked closely with the dev team at that company and began to shadow a few of them while looking into my schooling options.
I eventually found OSU’s post-bacc program and figured that while the best time to plant a tree may have been years ago when first introduced by my roommate, the second-best time was now.
I don’t know if it was the topic, the online format, or my newfound sense of responsibility as a father, but I have done so much better in this program than I ever did in my long journey as an undergrad. The job market in this industry may be a little rockier now than it was when I could have studied it the first time, but I’m still very excited to finish up this program and see what opportunities I am able to find in the workforce working with software.
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