Drop in the pond

31 Aug 2017

Why I Decided to try Software Engineering

My first encounter with software engineering was from my EE 160 Introduction to C Programming class. Before taking this course I was actually an electrical engineering major and was interested in electrophysics. What intrigued me about programming was that by your design you could make things pop up on the computer. You could even solve complex problems by applying algorithms that you developed. This all culminated in a maze runner program that we had to write for our final project. Although this project was a lot of work and the learning curve was steep but when I finally finished I had this huge sense of accomplishment. It was at this point I decided to switch my major to computer engineering.

What Built my Interests and Foundation

So here I am today three years later with more coding experience and knowledge. I have also developed many interests in computer engineering. This first of these is computer design which I discovered from my EE 361 class. I would like to work with computer processors, operating systems, and computer hardware design. The second interest I have is mobile app development. This started back when I first got into software engineering and I decided to download XCode onto my computer to get some iOS design. I unfortunately did not get very far because I decided to focus on school more but luckily for my junior design project I had to build an android app. After this project I became interested in android development and I went on to participate in a hackathon where my team built an android app and my internship with Booz Allen Hamilton also had android development.

Who Helped Shape my Future Learning Opportunities

One thing that my internship with Booz Allen Hamilton introduced me to is python. Python is one of the new skills that I hope to develop someday. One of the Booz Allen Hamilton associates was kind enough to offer free python tutorials and also held some “pynights” which were hackathons strictly using python. I attended some of these and learned a bit about python. Python is the most used language in software engineering today and it is also one of the most intuitive. Because of these attributes I would like to develop my python skills.