Santo Grillo (Sandy)
I was born in Baltimore, MD, and have lived there almost my whole life. I went to St. Pauls High School, where I took an International Baccalaureate curriculum. No computer science classes were offered there, but I really enjoyed the subject matter so I had to look elsewhere to learn about it.(see below) I think video games are are. I also really enjoy fencing. I started fencing during Middle School, and continued the sport throughout high school. I was on the Varsity team at Duke my first semester but am not anymore because of an accident that led to a medical withdrawal for 2 semesters. :( I also did crew in high school, and was a member of our varsity team there, but I was never a huge fan of the sport so I have not continued it since then.
I taught myself Visual Basic in high school because there were no computer science courses offered at my highschool. Following that, I took some courses at a local college to broaden my programming knowledge, taking courses in C++. I've written a good bit of code, and have been fairly succesful at it, but I still consider myself a novice.
I started Using a computer when I was Very young. One of the earliest memories I have is playing space invaders and tetris on a desktop running the MS-DOS 5.0 operating system. From there I moved on to Microsoft Windows mostly, as taht was the standard for a significant until recently. I've dabbled around with a Red Hat machine for a while, but generally found it to be a hassle so I ended up reformatting and reinstalling Windows. (Needed to run some specific sofware and Using an emulator got annoying.) I use computers everyday, for a plethora of tasks ranging from checking email, to researching papers, to checking sports scores. The dawn of the internet has really caused the computer to evolve into a basic neccesity. I think that computer scientists propably spend a decent amount of time actually coding; however I don't believe that their entire life revolves around staring at a monitor mindless typing away. Rather, being a computer scientist is more about working with a group of people to overcome specific challenges theoretically, before actually putting down these ideas into code. Finding new and creative ways to solve problems is awesome.
The two articles, Programming Doesn't Begin to Define Computer Science and A Techie, Absolutely, And More: Computer Majors Adding Other Skills to Land Jobs serve to demonstrate this. Computer Science is not just about turning into Dilbert, as we discussed in class. Rather, it is the science of applying new and exciting computer science concepts to real life in ways that benefit people on a daily basis. I'm interested in writing any type of program really. In terms of learning a computer language, and to practice constructing programs, I think that simple games (minesweeper, breakout, memory, ect) are great programs to make, since they're both entertaining and engaging to program. To be honest, I don't see how I could avoid using computers in the future. The computer is now so deeply entrenched in the workings of society that it would really be quite impossible to avoid using it.