Well, I’m officially starting this blog for CS 467 assignment at Oregon State, but I’ve actually wanted to started a blog for a while. I’m a computer science student (just one more term!) but before I started studying CS at OSU, I got a BA in English at Ohio University. Back in my OU days I wrote a lot, mostly because I had to for school, but still, it was something I mostly enjoyed and something, I like to believe, I was pretty good at. These days I don’t write much besides code, work emails, Reddit comments and text messages, so it will be good to re-sharpen my writing skills, and maybe even write something others will enjoy reading.
But enough about my writing aspirations. Let’s get back to OSU and computer science. As I mentioned earlier, this blog is an assignment for CS 467, which is the capstone course for Oregon State’s post baccalaureate computer science program. This is my last quarter in the program. I just have to complete the capstone and the other class I am taking this quarter (CS 492 Mobile Development) and I will be graduating with a BS in Computer Science. It’s been a very good program and I’ve learned a ton, but I’m very excited to graduate. Juggling a full time job and school can be pretty exhausting at times.
At some point I’d like to right a bit of a retrospective about my experience with OSU’s program. Even though I had been teaching myself programming and learning some of the fundamentals of computer science for about two years when I enrolled at OSU, I’ve learned so much over the 2.5 years I’ve been in this program. My favorite courses have been CS 271 -Computer Architecture and Assembly Language (really interesting look at how the physical components of a computer and how software interacts with it at the most fundamental level), CS 325 Analysis of Algorithms (I like the learning about algorithms and data structures and the more academic concepts in computer science. I took this one through OSU Cascades, the Bend campus- I live in Bend, by the way.) and CS 340 – Introduction to Databases (building a full stack web app with a Python Flask backend and mySQL database was a lot of fun. Honorable mention to CS 344 – Operating Systems I. That class was too hard for me to say it was fun, but I did learn a ton and getting an A in the class was the most rewarding accomplishment I’ve had so far in this program. I’d like to write about all the class eventually, but right now I’m more focused on the classes I’m currently enrolled in.
