#1 Looking back

I made it! I have made it to my final quarter at OSU! One quarter to rule them all and in the GPA bind them. It’s been a busy 2 years but I’m excited to be moving forward in a new job, in a new career, in a new city. With this blog98888888888888888888888888888888888 (my cat just walked on my keyboard so I’m keeping that in) I wanted to reflect on my time at OSU so far.

As a college freshman in 2013 I started working on a CS degree, but I wasn’t much of a student back then and I ended up graduating with a business degree instead. After school I started a career in procurement supply chain management, which was ok for a while but after switching jobs a couple times I found myself burn out. I had basically maxed out the Excel skill tree and was looking for new ways to challenge myself. I’ve always enjoyed technical work like programming but wasn’t finding it in my job, so I figured it was time to go back and finish what I started.

meet-cute: OSU

Thanks to some employer tuition assistance, I was able to start at OSU right away at no cost to myself. My goal: take 2 classes per quarter and finish in 2 years. I’ll pat myself on the back for making that happen, but just barely. 9 months into the program after a particularly difficult summer quarter, I took the fall quarter off and questioned all my life decisions but got back to it in January. In April I felt like I either needed to go down to 1 class per quarter (extending my graduation date significantly) or leave my job and go back to school full time. After working virtually for over a year I was mentally checked out of my job and couldn’t quite work up the gumption to call into another meeting. So I left.

Thanks to an amazing spouse who was able to support me emotionally and monetarily, I signed up for 3 classes the next quarter and got busy. I acknowledge this huge luxury and isn’t a realistic option for a lot of people, so I’ll leave it at that. After being a homebody for so long I’m ready to go back to work.

I have a job lined up at an aerospace company to do real time operating system (RTOS) development. I’m super excited to be working in the aerospace industry. I’ve always like the idea of being able to work on a physical product, rather than a website or app that really only exists in cyberspace. It’s cool to think that the product I’m working on will end up in space. The job is mostly writing code in C++, which, to be honest, I don’t have a lot of experience with. For my 467 project, I’ve signed up to do the space invaders emulator in C/C++ to help prepare for that. I think I’ll learn a lot about processors and architectures in the process, which should be enormously helpful in my new job.