This entire internship has been based around my preparation for college, so my mentor and I have talked a lot about his experiences. He went to UCSD and did not start out in Computer Science. He began in physics, took a CS class, and found that he like Computer Science much better and was good at it. The point is, it is okay to not know what I want to do before going to college. This is something I have grappled over for a long time, and I think I am coming to terms with it. I think it is good that I am exploring my options before college, but I also know that my interest can easily change and that's okay. Below is an image of my mentor as he looks most days, dressed casually and working from home, definitely not a bad life.
One of the projects we've worked on is a Mad Libs generator. Essentially, we created a Twitter bot that can write and tweet a Mad Lib story. All the user has to do is send a Direct Message to the Mad Libs Bot account and use certain parameters to tell the bot what part of the story is supposed to be generated by the bot. The picture with the code shows how I had to take code that we had previously written and integrate it with the Twitter aspect of our program. This is an exciting project as it uses all of the skills I've learned up to this point. Self advocacy has become a big part of my time here. I have noticed that if I want to learn, I have to ask questions about what I am doing, even if it makes me sound less intelligent on the subject matter. Because I am so new with computer programming, a big learning curve for me has been understanding the new jargon that comes with it. I've had to interrupt my mentor while he is explaining different programming topics and ask him to define certain words in order to further my understanding of our conversation. It felt uncomfortable for me to interrupt him at first, but soon we began to have an understanding of that and fortunately our conversations are much more fluid and efficient.
Here is my self-advocacy selfie: I've had two main work environments while at my internship; beside my mentor at his dinner table, and at a coffee shop. Either way, lots of coffee is involved. My mentor has given me an immense amount of one on one time which has been crucial for me. When I started out with my internship, I could barely define what a "variable" is. Now, while I have a long way to go before I consider myself good at programming, I know how to call "methods" and use "classes" efficiently, which is a big step up for me. I am extremely glad I chose this internship. My hope going into it was that I'd be able to gain a better sense on if Computer Science is something that I want to pursue in college. So far, I have learned a lot about CS and believe that I will have an answer to that wondering by the end of the internship. My mentor has given me a great amount of space and time to complete my work, so I do believe I will have enough time to get everything done. However, I will never truly be done with it all, because the goal of my project is to learn as much about programming as possible within the four weeks we have at internship.
Today was a bit more difficult. I am learning so much at once, which is amazing, but it can be hard to process (no pun intended) a lot of the new information I am getting. I'm feel like I need to slow down a bit and continue with the basics of programming. That being said, I am still working on some pretty cool problems. I have learned how to solve math problems using my computer. This is interesting because it is not so much about solving the math problem, but figuring out how to translate my thoughts into something that the computer can understand. This is what has been very difficult, but I have made progress and am hoping to make much more. Below is an image of some of the code that I used to solve one of the math problems.
My first day at my internship with FoundryLogic was great. My mentor works out of his house which was extremely different but welcoming. It is nice to have a homey feel to a work environment, I feel like it makes the work that much more enjoyable. I am very excited about the potential projects I will be doing with computer programming. I will potentially make a bot that respond to actions inputed into the computer, develop a dice game in a platform called Unity, and learn the programming language called Java. Below is a picture of my work environment along with the actual "scripting" I was doing. For my externship, I will be working with a family friend who owns his own IT consulting company. During my time here, I will be learning about computer science. More specifically, I will be learning how to code and implementing that into real life scenarios. I am most excited about learning the programming language itself. I believe that programming is an extremely valuable tool that I can take with me wherever I go in life and am eager to become proficient in Java (one of many different computer languages). Below is an example of a few different languages and their purposes with computers.
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