When I started college I was lost and adrift. The previous sentence certainly rings a bell to a large portion of college students today, but it rang painfully loudly for me. I had just finished high school and entered college with the realization that I had no true idea where my passions and interests lay. I spent a lot of time with computers and even worked a little with a family friend who ran a computer repair shop, but after a summer of that I knew I wasn’t passionate enough about finding the right broken part to replace or cleaning viruses to make a career out of it. As you probably realize now, I was looking toward the wrong places with computers, but I digress. The common advice that I was given in college was to work on general education classes while trying out classes that interested me, so that’s what I did. I tried accounting as several of my friends were going down that route and it seems like something I could see myself doing, but after one semester of an accounting class I concluded that it wasn’t a job I was passionate enough about to do and be happy with for my life. I tried some other electives in my college classes, but it all led to the same road as accounting. I’ll be honest, at some point I lost the motivation to try and find a career I was interested in. I autopiloted in community college just trying to get my liberal arts degree, not passionate about what I was doing, but with the thought that it was better than not going to school and just working my part-time job with no real career paths.
Of course this couldn’t go on forever, and the dreaded semester came where I would finally get my degree and had to choose a path to go down. There were many long nights of soul searching where I looked at myself and what I was interested in, but I did eventually come to a conclusion. That conclusion was that I loved solving problems. When I looked back, one of the reasons that I took that job at the computer repair shop was because I loved looking at a problem, diagnosing it, and trying to solve it. In regards to computers, I just happened to be looking at the wrong types of problems. The thought of becoming a programmer had crossed my mind due to my love of computers, but it all seemed very daunting and I didn’t know if it was for me and if I was capable. I knew I had to do something though, so I googled the best starting language for programming (which was quite a minefield with varying and passionate opinions) and landed on python. After using several resources to learn the basic resources, I tackled some beginner programming problems and it kind of all just hit me. This is it, this is what I want to be doing with my life. I then signed up for the Fall 2015 semester at UH Manoa as a computer science major and the rest is history.
I’m now in my fourth semester as a computer science major, and I’m happy to say that it was the right choice and I love it. When it comes down to it, programming is just problem solving with the various languages being your tools, so it scratches those itches that make a person feel fulfilled. Currently, I am slightly satisfied with how my problem solving skills have improved and progressed, but of course would love to improve them more. In regards to my programming skills and knowledge, while learning lasts a lifetime, I’m not too pleased with myself in this aspect. I realise that I really need to take on difficult and large projects to improve myself and my portfolio, but it’s hard to come up with ideas and find the time. I did improve on this front during the prevous winter break though, as I used the Qt UI framework to try and improve my C++ skills and gain experience working with a framework. It was pretty difficult as C++ is not easy, it was my first time working with any sort of framework, and the initial project I had planned was a bit out of my scope. I was pleased with the lessons I learned and small things I made with Qt though. Also, I’ve come up with a small project that I want to work on. It will be a quiz app based on capital cities, and I believe it will be a great way to improve my C++ and Qt skills. In this quiz app you will be given a set number of questions (most likely 10) displaying a country and there will be five choices to choose from, with one answer being the correct one and the other four being randomly picked from the pool. The positions of the answers will also be random.
One aspect of programming that I really want to work on and don’t have much experience in currently is working on a program with a group of people. I’ve only had one group programming project so far, and since most programming work is done in a group, it’s really something I want more experience in. It does seem like this desire will come true in ICS 314 though, which is the class I’m writing this for. Other than that specific desire, I just want to deepen my knowledge of the languages I already know and work on creating cool, difficult projects.