CompSci 6 - Spring 2009

David Lai

Elon, NC

It is kind of hard to remember back when I had first laid my hand on mouse and keyboard; I grew up with the progression of this technological age, and have always had access to computers for as far back as I can remember, but it was in the eighth grade that I received my first computer. It was a desktop made from HP, I cannot recall the model number but it had a 2.4 GHz processor, 512 MB of RAM, and 120 GB of hard drive space. It was not top of the line, but it far beyond par back in 2002 and it became my pride and joy. With occasional upgrades throughout its lifespan I was able to keep it and keep up; in fact, it is still being used at home even though I got a new and powerful laptop for college (except that there are some serious issues with the battery that I cannot really fix, and apparently neither can the service center that Best Buy sent it too; I get this thing back, and it seems like nothing has been fixed). I digress, it is not often that a day goes by that I have not used a computer, whether it is browsing the web (mostly facebook), doing homework, or entertaining myself, computers are in my everyday life. However, programming was never really part of my experience until late in high school. After taking a computer engineering course (I chuckle at the use of the word engineering since the class mostly involved reading instruction manuals to put together a pc) my instructor urged me to look into programming. So the next semester I took a basic programming course, and even though it did not delve in too far into the subject it excited me to know that the basic code I was writing is the groundwork to far more advanced programs that I use in my everyday life. As for being a programmer for a career path, I am not completely sure. This has nothing to do with stereotypes since I know for a fact they are not true (Blake Ross for example who I actually got to meet one time). It is just that I would like to more fully explore my options.

p.s. for some reason apostrophes get turned into black diamonds with question marks in them.