Name: Andrew Hsiao
Hometown: St. Louis, MO
Autobiography:
I first started using computers in elementary school, probably in third grade, when we got to use the old Apple computers with the little turtles and the 5 1/4" floppy disks. We used Hyperstudio, Clarisworks, and Mario Teaches Typing. We got our first computer when I was in fifth grade, which had 64 Mb of ram and 2Gb of hard drive space. I mostly played computer games on it, but it was helpful in writing reports and looking up stuff on the encyclopedia. We got the internet a few years later, which is when I discovered AOL Instant Messenger, which from that point onwards took over most of my free time. We eventually advanced from a 56k modem to 256k cable, which was probably the greatest improvement ever. My freshman year of high school, my friend and I built our own computers by doing our own research and buying parts ourselves. I ran an Epox motherboard with an AMD Athlon XP +1800 and a GeForce4 Ti4200. I continue to use this desktop to this day. My freshmen year of college I bought an Acer TravelMate 3000, which I actually use less than my desktop, but is useful for boring lectures.
I am experienced in using Windows, and fairly proficient at using Macs. I have used Linux only starting last year, but I am improving with practice. Typically, I use computers to surf the internet and keep in touch with people. I also enjoy listening to music, watching movies, and playing video games. It was my junior year in high school that I took a computer science class in Java, which got me interested in more computer programming. In my mind, computer scientists are given specific problems and create programs that can accomplish this problem quickly and efficiently.
One programming experience that I remember is going to a programming competition, and our entire team was not expected to win, and we went to the competition and got owned. But it was pretty fun. Another fun thing is this program that I wrote in high school that was supposed to be a game with a GUI. I ended up making a Blackjack program because my friend and I were really into Blackjack at the time, which came complete with animated cards and Blackjack dealer at the table. In the future, I see myself using computers to do more complicated tasks related to my major. As a BME/ECE major, I'm sure I would be doing modeling, signal processing, circuit analyses, etc.
Spring 2007 Schedule: