Chris Kim
I’m
currently a senior double-majoring in economics and computer science with a
minor in religion. I was born and raised
in the suburbs of
I first
started using a computer when I was in 4th grade. It was an old computer without Windows, where
everything had to be run through DOS. It
had a 5-¼ inch and a 3-½ inch floppy drive.
I mostly just used it to practice typing and to play “Nibbles.” To date, I’ve only owned PCs, but my older
brother has a Mac, so I know a bit about them.
I’ve also had very limited experience with Linux in from EGR53 and
ECE61.
On a
daily basis, outside of my classwork, I only really use my computer to surf the
web and to access my e-mail.
I was
introduced to computer science my freshman year of high school in an introductory
course that taught True Basic. It was a
fairly interesting class and for our final project, we made a primitive version
of BlackJack. That was probably the best
experience I’ve had in programming, because that was when programming was still
fun. My favorite programming project at
Duke was the short photo-editing program we wrote in CompSci100E. All I really did was finish implementing a
few of the methods, but it was a program that ended up having the functionality
of some photo-editing software that I’ve actually used.
My
impression of computer scientists is that most spend lots of time writing,
debugging, and extending programs, but some also research algorithms and do
lots of problem solving away from computers.
I’m not
completely sure if I want to end up in the computer science field. If I do, I would definitely like to be on the
front lines writing and editing programs.
However, if I end up doing something else, I’d probably only use
computers for word processing, e-mails, and web-surfing much like I do today.