This next post I will be detailing the first half of my academic experience at Oregon State University. Joining the program I had very little programming knowledge. I had dabbled a bit with python and I knew some very minimal basics, but not nearly enough to set me ahead in any way.

Starting classes was both extremely exciting and challenging. I decided I wanted to get through the program as fast as possible so I would be taking two classes per quarter while working full time. While that made for a busy schedule, luckily I was used to the grind from consistently working 60-70 hours per week at my previous job. Not only that, I was actively interested in learning about computer science so putting in the hours to study was much more bearable since I was so enthusiastic about learning.

Courses like 161 and 162 were great introductions to coding. They were fairly challenging but not too much to the point that it got overwhelming. Looking back, those are still two of my favorite courses in the program because of how much I learned and how much I enjoyed it. Other classes such as 225 and 271 were much more challenging and less enjoyable for me but I could see their importance and I still learned a lot from them.

I took 261 and 290 during my third quarter which was a summer term. This was one of my most challenging quarters. Between the shortened term length and the difficulty of the classes, I was much busier this quarter than my first two. However, I was still enjoying the program and highly motivated to learn from these two courses as web development and data structures are two essential topics that I knew I would utilize in my new career.

Finally, my fourth quarter, I ramped things up a bit and enrolled in 325, 340, and 361. This was also the term where I would begin preparing and applying for internships. Due to the sheer amount of work it took to take 3 classes in addition to leetcode prep and working, this was definitely my most challenging term. Unfortunately, I did not enjoy these 3 classes as much as I had previous classes. I didn’t feel like I was learning as much from the course content as I had in previous quarters. The courses seemed a little lacking in content and I learned most of the topics by googling them and watching YouTube videos. None the less, I managed to get through the quarter with decent grades. Additionally, googling topics is an essential skill to learn as a software engineer so it didn’t bother me much to have to find learning resources on my own.

In my next post I will talk more about the process of finding internships and the first internship I had during the program.