When I was an Incoming Freshman, Iowa State’s recruiting slogan was “Choose your Adventure”. It’s not a terrible slogan but at the time I did not appreciate its significance. Five years later, that phrase holds a special gravity for me. As I quickly approach graduation and becoming an full time software engineer it is clear to me that my course work and experiences have been critical to my professional success. I certainly was able to choose my educational adventure and I am proud of how I have grown and changed over the course of college.
Extracurricular activities have defined my college experience. One of my main draws to Iowa State was the Marching Band. I met all of my close friends and room mates through the band, I learned about my first internship experience through someone involved with the band, and I had the opportunity to grow my communication skills from feeble to formidable. My passion for music has also helped me realize that through practice there are no skills you can’t learn. The my dedication to practice and perfection carries over into my professional work. I have been able to successfully build my skill set through pointed and repetitious practice.
Marching Band has taught me to successfully work with people. There are over three hundred members of the marching band. Within that number it’s almost a statistical guarantee that you’ll meet people who you don’t get along with. In some cases the people you disagree with the most are people who you need to rely on for the band to be successful. I encountered this problem several times within the band. As a result I have learned how to remain professional and function as an effective team even when there is personal baggage involved. Every person who you interact with has a completely different background and possibly view of the world. My interactions throughout the marching band have helped me realize and account for this. These experiences have shaped how I interact with my coworkers in professional situations and my fellow students in the classroom.
One of the things that I love about software engineering is that the field is so new. There is boundless potential for new ideas and to go off the beaten path. The internet has vastly increased my access to information and my ability to solve any problems I might face. Websites like https://github.com allow me to collaborate with other engineers from all over the world and find the prior art for problems which I am thinking about tackling.
My learning style is very hands on. By using the material I am trying to learn I am able to better comprehend and retain what I am learning. Iowa State’s Computer Engineering curriculum contains several project based courses which I have found not only enjoyable but extremely informative.
The first project class I took at Iowa State was embedded systems or CPRE288. In CPRE288’s semester long lab section you are required to program a robot to autonomously navigate an obstacle course. The lab replicates what it might be like to write the software for a mars rover. Some of the challenges involved were making sure that the code I wrote was robust enough to complete any challenges it faced.
My second project based class was software development or COMS309. Everyone in the class was placed in groups of max 4. The groups had to decide on a project idea which was pitched to the instructor of the class. My group was ambitious and decided that we wanted to create a web based collaborative text editor. Each member of our team had to learn new software skills to deliver the project. I was one of the more experienced members of our team so it was an excellent opportunity to work on my leadership and hone my deeper technical knowledge when making architectural decisions or helping out team members with any problems they encountered on the journey.
My final project based class is Senior Design. Senior Design is typically taken by graduating seniors over the course of their last year at Iowa State. The projects are typically challenging and they take the work of 6+ group members over two semesters to complete. My project is building a tool for livestock producers which helps them find the best time to sell their cattle profitably. I was the technical lead for our project. The greatest challenge was the ambitious scope. Creating an application which could run on iOS, Android, and Web was difficult. We ran into a large amount of development environment issues when creating the application. Over all, the experience was positive for myself and my team members who gained stronger development skills and most importantly communication and teamwork skills.
If I could go back in time, I would smack my younger self. I would have been well served by being more studious. Given no restrictions I would go back to the first grade and make sure that I knew math would come to me if I dug in and worked hard at it. The ever lingering spectre of math has been to my detriment throughout schooling. My struggles have certainly helped me develop into the person I am today. But, I feel that my ceiling could have been higher without subpar math skills and a fear of the subject holding me back. I would also impart with myself with a deeper appreciation for relationships. As a freshman I thought that nothing mattered except my technical skills. In reflection I would weight communication skills far more heavily than technical skills. While technical prowess can be easly gained, It can be much harder to teach someone to communicate. I have done plenty of networking and have continued to build my social skills but any extra time spent improving is never a bad thing.