Hi, my name is Michael Borish, and I am from Fort Walton Beach, FL. Fort Walton is a little town in the extreme northwest part of the panhandle of Florida. I am a junior in Pratt with a dual major in ECE and CS, and I am also trying to put in a minor in Econ to mix up my classes a little.
I first started using computers in school in K5. Back then, they were still commodores with no internal hard drives. My first home computer was a Packard Bell which I believe we got when I was about eight. My mom was told it would carry me all the way through college, but was that ever a joke. Since then it has been nothing but Dells. My first exposure to the Unix and Linux operating systems was here at Duke in my engineering and computer science classes. I've never actually played around on a Mac yet, I've only seen them from a distance.
Computers have always interested me from the moment we got that old Packard Bell. Computers have an innate sense of both complexity and simplicity. The individual components aren't much to look at, but replicate a simple pattern hundreds of thousands of times and combine them with other components using the same technique, and the complexity of a computer takes off. CPS 100, while a difficut and time consuming class for me, was also quite interesting. The programs with practical applications like the Huffman compression assignment are what interest me the most. While I appreciate theory, I am looking for something that has practical applications to my life.
I use my computer for just about everything on a daily basis from shopping to communicating with my friends to homework and games. I can't see a future in which I don't make heavy use of the computer. I'm not sure exactly what field I want to get into after college and I'm not really sure what a computer scientist does. I have seen some go to work for banks, work on fiber optic networks for the military, and others work for cable companies.