I signed up for a computer programming class junior year. I was curious, my father had taught himself how to code and I thought it would be cool to learn. I never thought it would turn out to be anything other than a hobby. As soon as class started the first day, I knew I had stumbled into something amazing. I found a passion for coding. I love the challenge coding gives me, I have to think to solve my problems. I love the feeling I get when something I’ve made becomes real, when the coding works and the results are beautiful.
The best part of majoring in computer science (CS) or information technology (IT) is that you can do anything with it. For example, in the medical field there is a growing number of CS/IT jobs available. Computer Science Degree Hub says that IT professionals make up a significant number of hospital staff because of their vital skills that help keep information updated, secure, and available to doctors. Other options that are more related include an IT consultant, a developer or programmer, application analyst. You can work with software, hardware, code, databases anything technology related. The possibilities are almost endless.
I’m not sure exactly what I’m going to do but I know I want to help people and I have tried to do this with all of my projects. My first real project was in 2014 when my brother Conner was too anxious to present his favorite stuffed animal for Show and Tell. Conner has autism and the idea of show and tell upset him. So the next day I introduced him to Dino the talking dinosaur. I used a site called Scratch to make a dinosaur character that would talk with him and react positively to anything he said. I added prompts so that Dino’s responses went along with Conner's. The two had a conversation and Conner felt he could talk about his toy at school the next day.
So now two year later I am a CS major. I spent a summer learning different coding languages and working on projects, starting with Dino, then a robot that can locate objects and navigate around. I've worked with a partner to create a website focused on autism awareness, and I have loved every project. Maybe not every minute, there are times when I'm frustrated and ready to give up, there are times when my code doesn’t work and I don’t know why, there are days when everyone in my introduction to CS class jokes about changing majors, but through all those frustrating moments are the great ones where I find the bug that's been stopping my code from working, I figure out how to solve my problem, and realize that this is exactly what I want to do. I know my future holds many more amazing projects brought to life from a sheet of code.
