As I have approached the end of my academic road I have had time to reflect on my experiences and my expectations for the future. When I graduate I hope to have a job building distributed systems using web technologies. The cloud, big data, and the security challenges of the task excite me and I believe that the field will provide ample opportunity for me to learn and grow as an engineer.

While at Iowa State, I have been heavily involved on campus and the community.

I spent four years in the ISUCF’V’MB (Iowa State Cyclone Football ‘Varsity’ Marching Band). For three of those years I played snare drum, and for my final year I was selected to be one of the three drum majors. Through the band I have been able to travel to places like Memphis, Tennessee for the Liberty Bowl in 2012, and Normandy France to represent the United States in the 2016 D-Day commemorative ceremonies.

Project Summary
A full-stack livestock management platform developed for cross-platform deployment (Web/iOS/Android) using React Native and Node.js. The system integrated real-time commodity market data with cattle health monitoring to optimize rancher profitability.

Why?

Every year farmers across America lose hundreds of thousands of dollars selling their head. Keeping track of each individual head’s feed, weight, age, and health is an overwhelming task to do be hand. On top of this, the Chicago Stock Exchange only provides room for profit a few hours each week.

The purpose of having a “Code of Ethics is to hold ourselves to a certain standard and recognize that with great power comes great responsibility. As engineers in some cases the things we make decide life or death depending on the quality of our work. It is important to understand that cutting corners and doing things unethically is wrong and in some cases outright dangerous and should be avoided at all costs. When faced with an ethical dilemma I like to make my thought process fairly straight forward. I examine the problem and determine what the problem is. From there I decide the course of action that will produce the least amount of harm. To do so I weigh human costs and material costs, human usually outweigh all material costs.

The Mars Rover was the final project for my Computer Engineering 288 Class (Embedded Systems). In the class we learned about programming embedded systems which are small microchips with limited memory and processing power.

In our case, we programmed on the ATMEGA128 processor mounter on an iRobot platform. The iRobot Create platform we used included infrared sensors, sonar sensors and a servo. The main goal of the project was to navigate the Rover to avoid obstacles and end up at a “Check Point” determined by 4 small pillars surrounding it.