hometown: los angeles, ca
studying: electrical and computer engineering, computer science, mathematics
year: senior
current classes: compsci 108, compsci 110, composci 116, ece 154
hobbies: guitar, ultimate, soccer, basketball, tennis, snowboarding, photography, lulu
favorite websites: ziguana, reddit, xkcd
autobiography
I've been using computers ever since I was old enough to wiggle the mouse. My first computer was a Pentium 90 MHz machine with a 200MB hard drive. I used to play lots of old school games like Reader Rabbit, Treasure Cove, and Oregon Trail.
These days I do most of my work on a computer that I built in high school (3.4 GHz P4, 2GB RAM, Radeon 9800XT). I use it for homework, web design, and playing games. I also have a PowerBook G4 that I use for basic stuff like email, music, and web browsing.
I first became interested in programming in 8th grade, when I had to buy a TI-83 calculator for my algebra class. I soon discovered that I could cheat on my homework by writing simple programs in BASIC to do most of the problems for me.
Depending on where they reside - industry or the academic realm - I think a computer scientist could have many roles. In the industry, computer scientists spend a lot of their time planning and designing. They might be working on a new project, or adding additional functionality to an existing one. They will obviously spend a lot of time actually coding as well, but I think more time is probably spent in the design phase. In the academic realm, computer science professors likely spend the majority of their time outside of the classroom doing research, writing papers, and probably developing code of their own. Many are probably active in the open source community these days.
I am currently working on designing a fantasy sports website (ziguana.com) with some friends from back home. The experience has probably been the most interesting and educational of my computer science career. I am essentially responsible for managing the database system and the writing majority of the backend scripting on the site. It has been very cool to design such a large-scale project from the ground up and it's also a great way to stay in touch with a group of my best friends.
I also interned at Microsoft this summer working on Exchange Server 2010. The experience was definitely a valuable one, and I hope to take what I learned into other areas of computer science. Having my own feature in a product that will be used by thousands of people is definitely cool, but I did find lots of the procedures and bureaucracies of working at such a large company to be frustrating at times.
One of my favorite programming assignments was the Boggle project from COMPSCI 100. I just thought it was a really interesting use of recursion and artificial intelligence.
In the future, I will probably be using computers in lots of the same ways I use them today, but I expect mobile devices to become more ubiquitous. More and more functionality seems to be available in your pocket each year, and I hope that trend continues from both a productivity and entertainment standpoint.