The Wilson Buzz: Choices, part one

You know how when you're little people ask you "What do you want to be when you grow up?" I still don't know the answer to that question. I have one degree and am over halfway through another one, and I'm still not sure this is what I want to do.

When I was a freshman at university, I took all gen. ed. courses. Eighteen hours the first semester, and my adviser told me that I wouldn't have enough options if I didn't pick a major soon. So I flip through the course catalog and narrow it down to two: computer science and digital animation. The plan was to take an intro course or two in each and see which one I liked. Then I really started to look at the intro courses, and you had to take drawing and charcoal and sculpting and...I'm not an artist. So I just took Comp Sci I (1170).

I had never thought about how stuff happened with computers, really. My high school didn't have a class where you learned programming. The closest I had ever gotten to it was putting a little break tag in my MySpace page to space out paragraphs. Now I'm in this crazy world learning C++ and...it totally blew my mind. It was fascinating. But the professor was constantly telling us how crucial a complete understanding was, and that if we didn't get this 100% the next class would be terrible. So I got psyched out. I decided to retake the class, even though I was probably pulling a B. And once I made up my mind to retake it, I got lazy. Didn't do the last few labs, didn't try hard on the final....got a D in the course. Almost lost my scholarship. Almost got murdered by my parents.

So I retook the class over the summer. Different professor, now familiar material, easy A. I loved it even more. I took Comp Sci II (2170) and loved it. It was so interesting! The spring semester of my sophomore year I took two CS classes - Discrete Structures (3080) and Advanced Data Structures (3110). At this point I hadn't gotten to know anyone else in the department. This weird kid - Hac - in 3080 starts talking to me, and by the end of the semester we're friends. But he's not taking 3110. And that class...oh that class. I have never been so overwhelmed in my life! I still don't understand how I managed to pull a B in that class.

Now it is the end of my sophomore year, and I've started to make friends in the department.

And now it is midnight, and I have to teach an 8:00am class. So here are some pictures - goodnight.