Molding Career Aspirations
18 Jan 2018
What do I want to be when I grow up? How will I support myself and my family in the future? These questions raced through my mind as an elementary school student. I knew that I wanted to be exceptional in my future career. I just did not know, or could not decide on, what I wanted to be so good at. I just knew that I wanted to be one of the best. I guess you could attribute that to my competitive nature. Fortunately, my passion for software engineering was spurred soon after. The driving force behind this passion stems from my involvement in my middle school robotics program. I reluctantly joined the robotics team after frequent requests from the team advisor. This hesitant decision turned out to be one of the best decisions I have ever made. It formed the initial mold of my career aspirations. Of course, this mold has changed and evolved over time, but its origin is from robotics. I served as the team programmer and although the development environment featured an incredibly user-friendly drag and drop interface, I started to think logically. Almost like a computer would, if you will. All of the actions performed by the robot had specific conditions which followed a projected sequence of events.
Going into high school, my passion for software development had further intensified. The robots were more complicated, requiring a fundamental knowledge of circuitry and of less user-friendly programming environments. The IDEs were now text-based but also offered so much more power over interfacing with the robot’s hardware components. At the time, my interests regarding software development shifted toward embedded systems and low-level (firmware) programming. Over my high school career, I continued to expand my skillset by learning C, C++, and Python.
When senior year rolled around, I was tasked with finding a topic to write a research paper about and also to create a project regarding my research. As a child, I had always seen futuristic concepts such as biometric eye scanners and autonomous cars in movies and wanted to learn more about bringing such technology into reality. Thus, I decided to do my senior project on vision processing. Although it was daunting at first, I jumped right in and through the long nights, everything slowly fell into place. I learned so much about a topic I knew nothing of initially. Using the open source libraries, I learned about the core components of image processing and how to implement such techniques in software.
In the present day, I continue to pick up even more skills as a college student and as a software/electrical engineering intern. My internship has enabled me to further polish my skills in low-level software development in addition to acquiring completely new skills. Skills such as PCB design and mechanical design that I thought I would never learn. Interestingly, my interests all seem to be inter-related in one way or another. Looking forward, I am eager to learn more software languages, improve my understanding of the ones I currently know, and to pick up even more skills in multidisciplinary areas. It’s crazy to think that all of this began from programming a robot in middle school.