Gaining Experience in a New Field

28 Aug 2023

It is often said that the first steps are the hardest. While I can agree to that statement to some extent, I also believe that it is midway through the journey, when the mind and body have started to wear down and grow weary, that the most difficult times can come.

Starting computer science after being a biology major for one year never really made me feel like I was super behind. I did all the classes I needed to and got the grades I wanted but eventually I came to realize that I needed to be doing more than that. I needed a passion for what I was doing in order to keep going, to keep putting one foot in front of the other and finding reasons to continue on this path. For a while I couldn’t tell anyone, not to mention myself, where I wanted to take my degree and the future that would come along with it.

When things started to change…

With the introduction of the CCM, Creative Computation Media, certificate to me by my advisor, I slowly started to build an idea of what I wanted to do with what I was studying. Bringing together a hobby I have in video games, music, and art, with the computer science degree I am working to receive, it feels like the perfect fit. But I am still a noob it a lot of these areas.

Coming into this software engineering class with pretty much a blank canvas of experience and ideas, I hope that by the end of this course I will have a more concrete vision of where I want to be in ten years and a buttload of more experience in this area of programming.

An area I am really excited for is the final project. Having heard about it and even tested friends’ websites who took this class in the past, I am looking forward to having a conclusive product for this class that will showcase what I have learned and accomplished. Along the way to that, though, I also hope to gain inspiration to start doing more side projects on my own and take initiative to begin working towards my career in computer science in the future through the experience and skills I hope to gain from the class.

In conclusion…

I hope that through all the WODs, in class, graded, and timed, coding exercises, and eventual projects, by the end of this course this semester I will have a much deeper understanding of software engineering along with the practical skills to bring my ideas to life. This class is one that I have been looking forward to taking and I am excited to see it through to the end!