Robotics Led Me Here
03 Sep 2020Fifth Grade: Where It All Started
In the fifth grade, my teacher asked if I was interested in joining the robotics team. I obviously said yes. What is cooler than making robots? I continued robotics up until high school. It became my passion and I probably spent more time thinking about robotics than in actual school. As much as I loved building robots, I ultimately found myself programming robots as much as I was building them. I went into High School thinking I was going to pursue a career in engineering. However, after spending so much time programming, I made the decision in my senior year to pursue a degree in Computer Science. This decision was mainly due to how much programming intrigued me. There was so much for me to learn but all of it sounded so interesting. If I learned how to code, I could make fun video games, websites, maybe learn some hacking? Also, topics such as machine learning and artificial intelligence were on the rise. I could not fathom the possibilites those fields could have in the near future. To me going into computer science was an easy decision because I saw the world heading more and more towards a technological future dependent on computers.
Learning Real Code
Although I spent a lot of time in high school programming I never actually had much experience with an actual programming language. If you asked me how many programming languages I knew I would simply say none. Most of the time when I was programming I was using drag and drop interfaces where you would put together blocks of code like a puzzle. I believe the software we used in robotics was called “EasyC” and is based on the C language. I did have some experience with C but I never had to depend on it for our robots. At the time I had very little experience writing lines of actual code.
All this meant I went into my freshman year understanding programming concepts without knowing how to actually code. I understood how to use for loops, if then statements, and while loops but did not know the proper way to write them. I was like those kids who can understand thier parent’s native language but cannot speak it. However, the experiences I had in High School made the learning process much easier. Eventually, I became familiar with Java, C, C++, and now JavaScript
Moving Forward
There is much I have to learn when it comes to Software Engineering. Everything is so new to me and there is so much information coming to me at once. I often face difficulty because I have so many questions to ask but no idea how to ask them sometimes due to not knowing all the terms and concepts. However, that is also what makes this field so exciting to me. There is so much to learn but also endless possibilities to what you can create. The whole reason I decided to study computer science is to someday create my own video game, or software that changes the world. I look forward to what I have yet to learn in this class.