While I was in high school, I never saw myself becoming a STEM major. I had an interest in the business field and planned to pursue a career related to business. However, as I was deciding my major during college applications, I realized I never stopped to ask myself the question, “What exactly did I like about business?” I pondered this for weeks and came to the realization that what I really enjoyed about the business field was being able to create products that would help others. However, many STEM majors, like civil and mechanical engineering, required tools that I could not easily get ahold of. Also, you could not widely share your amazing creations without mass producing them. This led me to the computer science field. It fit all the qualities I was looking for in a major. I already had the tools necessary to start programming; many people could access what you have created, and I could create products to help others.
My journey to my computer science degree started in my freshman year in college, where I was exposed to my first programming language, Java. Initially, there were a lot of struggles with learning my first programming language, especially since I am a slow learner and this was the first online course I had ever taken. I was confused by the terminology that my professor was using during lectures, and the assignments were so challenging that I could not complete some of them within the allotted time. During this first year, I was questioning whether or not I even wanted to continue as a computer science major because I saw how quickly other students were progressing throughout the course. Desperately trying to catch up to my other classmates, I reached out to senior computer science majors and began to meet others in the course. They reassured and helped me with the course, which in turn boosted my confidence. The connections that I made with other computer science majors also allowed me to acquire my first job as a web developer, while other students who succeeded at first were not able to make these valuable connections.
In the future, I hope to continue to explore the different fields of computer science. I also hope to gain more experience with creating web and mobile applications and eventually be able to create full-stack applications on my own. I would also like to get to use more APIs, such as the Google Maps API, and hopefully build one of my own. In addition, I would like to experience working on different software engineering teams to get a feel of different work environments.