Change of Heart

28 Aug 2016

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Before starting at the University of Hawaii, I had never been exposed to programming at all. The only exposure I had to software engineering or software development as a whole was during a career day at my high school. There was a software engineering group visiting to talk to students and I had signed up to see what they were about. After listening to them talk about what they did and their experiences, I thought that software engineering sounded like the worst, most boring occupation in the world. Fast-forward a few years and now I can happily say I’m on track to become a software engineer myself.

The first programming course I took was EE160, where they teach students how to write code in C. Since I had no idea what coding or programming was, so I really wasn’t sure what to expect from the class. Right away I fell in love with what we were doing in the class; solving simple problems like creating a function to exponentiate numbers, to more complicated applications like processing data in various files. What I really enjoyed was the problem solving aspect of programming. I decided to become an engineer to do just that, solve problems, and now I had been exposed to this great new way to do that. From there I was eager to learn more about all the different languages and applications of software engineering.

As I move forward in this field, I hope to learn many new skills and avenues to apply those skills to better the world we live in. It seems computers are being placed in every nook and cranny of our lives which will lead to more and more applications for software engineering. We are also furthering what we can do with computers in areas like Virtual and Augmented reality, and as those markets grow I hope to gain experience developing for those new technologies.