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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13832,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/papasloth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/papasloth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/papasloth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/papasloth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13832"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/papasloth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/papasloth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/papasloth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4\/revisions\/6"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/papasloth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/papasloth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/papasloth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}