Big Dreams
29 Aug 2017
To be completely honest, when I first started majoring in Computer Science at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, I wasn’t sure whether or not this major was the major for me. Throughout my education, I had always enjoyed studying math and science much more than things like history and English, and I quite enjoyed using my computer at home, particularly for playing games. It was off of this basis alone that I decided to major in Computer Science. I can now say, however, that I fully believe that I made the right choice when I selected Computer Science as my major. Although first learning how to code was a bit of a struggle (I can’t even begin to count how many hours I’ve lost to simple typos…), I have great expectations of myself as I continue to study Computer Science.
Beginnings
When I wrote my first Hello World program, I had no idea what I was getting myself into. The saying that “Computer always do exactly what you tell them to” is something I always remember. Computers can’t think–we can only tell them what to do. If you give the computer code that doesn’t work, code with a typo in it, or code with an endless loop, the computer will execute it exactly as it’s written. This aspect of coding was a little difficult for me, as it meant that I had to be very meticulous about how I wrote programs and went about doing my work. It was also very time-consuming, especially because I was a beginner who had absolutely no idea how coding worked, and I lacked the mindset to write good code. As time went on, however, I’ve become used to writing code, and can honestly say that I very much enjoy it, especially when I write something and it works exactly how I want it to.
Goals
While I’m writing like I’ve been coding for a long time, I’m actually still a beginner, and I have a lot of goals that I’d like to achieve. Of these, I think the one that I think is the most important is being able to write large-scale, coding projects. I want to be flexible enough to write programs using multiple languages across multiple platforms. In addition to this, I hope to further my knowledge in coding so that I can think in code more easily. In order to achieve this, I also want to learn more coding languages. If I can do this, then I can make better decisions when choosing which language to code certain projects in, and also be able to write multiple parts of a system on my own. Finally, I hope to be able to perform under pressure and/or with a deadline, and this is something that I hope I may learn in my various college classes.