Blog Post #1

My thoughts on Computer Science, why I chose the projects I did, and what makes them interesting to me – compiled for the CS 467 Capstone class at OSU

I can’t believe that I finally made it here – the final class for this course. I still remember thinking the first time I graduated college, “I’m never doing that again…”.

Why did you choose to go into Computer Science?

In fact, the first time I graduated college was from OSU as a Civil Engineer. Since then, I have been working as a Engineering Intern in Portland, OR. That job has had me all over Oregon working on different sites and bouncing around to different offices – at least up until COVID happened.

Right before the lockdown began I was toying with the idea of going to grad school, I just wasn’t sure what topic I wanted to study. After doing some research, I decided Coastal Engineering would be a good fit for me, so I began looking around at some college curriculums. Again and again, I would read the curriculums and think it looked so boring; at least until I got to the section that used R and Python to manage the large sets of data. It was then I thought to myself, “If I continue to find myself interested only in the parts that involved programming why don’t I just do that?”. This, along with years of general interest in the topic, is what drove me to end up here in this program studying Computer Science.

Why did you choose the projects you did on the survey? What makes them interesting to you?

I was actually fortunate enough to pair up with two other students I met online before the class even started, so the projects selected were chosen as a group. For me personally, the most interesting project on the list was the AI Coder. I have been both fascinated and mystified by AI since I was a kid. I would always wonder how in the world people could program a computer in a game to be different levels of difficulty. Now, with the advent of GPT-3 and ChatGPT, it has never been easier to utilize AI tools for the layperson.

As soon as ChatGPT came out, I started testing the limits of it’s capability. I would say that I am a far cry from a “Prompt Engineer”, but I have enough experience at this point to know what will work well with the system and what won’t. On top of this, my dad works in the AI division at Microsoft so we have had tons of conversations about the topic. This is why the project stood out to me so much. I have been wanting to spend more time documenting my experience and experimenting with different AI tools for a while now; however, being in school while working has made this difficult to say the least. Since this project is our number 1 choice, I really hope we get selected for it – but if not, the Cross-Platform Personal Trainer App sounds cool too I guess..