When I was in high school, I loved the idea of coding and developing an app. For my junior project, I planned to create an app for my high school that would be similar to our high school website but with real-life applications showing the lunch menu, event reminders, etc. I was determined, downloading Swift Playground. I was having fun creating a template, but I could only do so much with no coding experience and little time. That was the first time I felt I wasn’t meant for this major because I felt stuck and didn’t know how to keep going. But I didn’t lose hope when my high school finally started a Computer Science elective class, which I immediately registered for my senior year.
Joining that class, I knew I wanted to do it more in the future. This class wasn’t just about learning what computer science was. Rather, it felt more exploratory with our teacher giving us many projects. First, we played with Python, my first time officially learning code. It was fun making some of the user-input games we made as I raced my friends on who could finish coding the game first. Then we moved on to HTML, Javascript, and CSS. The website was quite fun when we learned to be more specific in style and layout. The most complicated project we had for this was to make a login page similar to Facebook. Then we switched to tearing down and building CPUs and used our best teardown for the next part to see if we correctly built it right. We used these PCs to learn about some basic IT work, like sharing network folders and protecting our accounts with the help of our IP address. This was one of the best classes I took that motivated me to join the Computer Science field.
However, going to college was a huge challenge for me. The first few ICS classes I took were so challenging that I thought I would change majors. It was a huge challenge for me, and I definitely needed help for every assignment. But the main problem was I was afraid to. I kept thinking that I was so stupid and the TAs would judge me on how I got this far, knowing nothing. That was until I finally reached the ICS 300s where I knew others who were just as clueless as me. This was when I finally started having more courage to speak up for even the smallest confusion I had.
When I came to the first day of ICS 314, I just knew this would be one of my favorite classes for this semester. Professor Philip Johnson had the excitement and enthusiastic attitude that I knew meant he has a passion for this field. Although the assignments are a bit challenging and very time consuming, I know it will be all worth it in the near future because he’s just trying to prepare me for what our future holds in this field. I hope that I can instantly know what to do when given mini problems to solve like WODs, and how to better improve my skills. This class teaches me skills I lack, such as understanding my coding terms like classes, constructors, attributes, methods, etc. As his assignments focus on coding language and being able to comprehend terminology, I know that I’m finally gonna improve my skills because of the effort he’s putting into us.