About Me
I have spent the last seven years after graduating from college in the Navy. I have worked as a submarine officer and cryptologic warfare officer and lived in Washington, New York, South Carolina, and Maryland. I got out of the Navy in December 2021 and will be a full-time student until I graduate in March 2022.
Outside of school/work I enjoy road and mountain biking, restoring old road bikes, snowboarding, and reading.
Why OSU?
I realized half way through my undergraduate studies in mechanical engineering that what I enjoyed the most in my courses was writing code in MATLAB. We learned to write code to do everything from analyzing and graphing lab data to modeling fluid flow. After graduation, I took some free introduction to computer science courses on EdX and Coursera which convinced me that I wanted to become a software engineer. The post-bacc CS program through Oregon State University allowed me to work towards a degree while working full time.
The Program So Far
I am in my final quarter at OSU and am taking CS467 – Online Capstone and CS352 – Introduction to Usability Engineering. The courses so far have given me exposure to a wide range of topics from computer architecture and assembly language to cloud application development and encouraged me to dive into subjects that are important (like discrete mathematics), but that I might not otherwise have deeply studied.
I was fortunate enough to do a six month software engineering internship at a proprietary trading firm in Chicago, where I developed full stack web applications using Vue.js and Flask. The course material that I learned in my web development and software engineering courses at OSU definitely helped, but the most important thing I have learned during the OSU program is how to find resources and teach myself new concepts, topics, and frameworks.
Capstone Goals
I started to really enjoy web development over the course of my internship (especially after learning some front end frameworks that abstracted away some DOM interactions). I want to use what I have learned in my internship and OSU coursework to build a full stack application.
