The way I measured success at my internship was by how much information I could understand after a conversation with my mentor. I told my mentor that I expected learning computer science to be a lot like how I learned Calculus. When I first started learning Calculus, I had to stop my teacher several times because there were a lot of key words that went over my head during lectures. At the end of the year, however, I looked back on those struggles and realized how trivial they were. I expected learning Computer Science to be the same way, and sure enough, that's how it went.
The overall goals of this internship were more abstract. I really wanted to learn more about myself and gain a better sense of how I work intellectually. The more concrete goal was to figure out if Computer Science was a good fit fore me for college. Overall, I am satisfied with the outcome for both goals. I definitely learned about myself during this process. One day where I especially felt this way was when my mentor and I went and visited two unique places in the CS world. We visited a company called Procuro and met with the CTO who gave us a tour of this relatively small software company. This visit made me think about what kind of place I would like to work at if I go into CS. We also went to UCSD and sat in on a technology presentation. This presentation showcased the work that the UCSD tech offices were able to accomplish with the other departments like biology and archaeology. This presentation was interesting for me because I've always thought that, if I were to go into CS, I would want to incorporate another field into my work, and this showcased that perfectly. The projects we worked on were what really made me feel like CS will be a part of my future in college. Not only did we create the Twitter bot mentioned in one of my previous posts, but we also worked on solving complicated math problems using programming and we worked on a project called Robocode which is a game where the user programs a tank to battle other tanks. In the tank game, your tank is only as good as you program it, so it is a great way to improve your own skills and practice. Pictures of the projects are below:
The overall goals of this internship were more abstract. I really wanted to learn more about myself and gain a better sense of how I work intellectually. The more concrete goal was to figure out if Computer Science was a good fit fore me for college. Overall, I am satisfied with the outcome for both goals. I definitely learned about myself during this process. One day where I especially felt this way was when my mentor and I went and visited two unique places in the CS world. We visited a company called Procuro and met with the CTO who gave us a tour of this relatively small software company. This visit made me think about what kind of place I would like to work at if I go into CS. We also went to UCSD and sat in on a technology presentation. This presentation showcased the work that the UCSD tech offices were able to accomplish with the other departments like biology and archaeology. This presentation was interesting for me because I've always thought that, if I were to go into CS, I would want to incorporate another field into my work, and this showcased that perfectly. The projects we worked on were what really made me feel like CS will be a part of my future in college. Not only did we create the Twitter bot mentioned in one of my previous posts, but we also worked on solving complicated math problems using programming and we worked on a project called Robocode which is a game where the user programs a tank to battle other tanks. In the tank game, your tank is only as good as you program it, so it is a great way to improve your own skills and practice. Pictures of the projects are below: