“…make an introductory blog post describing your best “in class” computing experience as a computer science student and you best “outside the class” computing experience during your time as a computer science student.”
When I started out four years ago as a computer science major, I thought I had a pretty good idea of what that meant. I’ve never been so wrong in all my life. You see, it’s a common misconception that Computer Science is programming. In reality, programming is but a small portion of the field – computational theory, calculus, complexity, database management, data structures, algorithms, math, math, and MATH is Computer Science.
Unfortunately for myself, I fell on the wrong side of that misconception and had a huge reality check that year when I realized that the topics contained within the field of Computer Science were so much deeper and more complex than I’d ever imagined.
That being stated, my “…best ‘in class’ computing experience…” came during the latter half of my sophomore year. Each year, Appalachian State University hosts a tournament within the CS Department – the Uno A.I. tournament.
The premise was simple; using the library built by the department, design and implement an A.I. to play the popular card game, Uno, against every other student’s attempt. You could run yours against professor’s code, against previous winner’s code, and optimize further and further until you’d built a mathematical, card-counting, uno-playing maniac of an A.I.
The Grand Prize? A cake.
A delicious cake baked by one of the most revered professors in the department; topped with the bragging rights that came with being the CS 2440 King (or Queen).
True to anti-climatic form, mine came in eighth place. After four weeks of continuous, incremental progress and optimization, I came in Eighth place. I’d never considered myself capable of competing with the brilliance of my peers; I was the kid that had to work my butt off and study my butt off just to have a chance at achieving top grades. Then, all the sudden, I’m the eighth-best brain in the room (of over sixty). It felt exhilarating and while 8th place isn’t exactly something to be proud of, I’m proud of it regardless.
My best out-of-classroom experience came much later on – during the cold month of December. I was in the midst of my internship at G2 Telecom, a small-time company with big-time clients and even bigger ambitions. Most of my responsibilities as an intern pertained to grunt work, sifting through a data dump (mostly billing documents), extracting the relevant data, composing it into meaningful figures and formulas, then presenting to the boss-man. Simple as that. However, when faced with over a thousand individual files, each somewhat different than the last? I felt like a peon being crushed under the weight of the workload.
By my second day, I’d already automated some of my work. I went home the night prior, picked the biggest batch of files that had identical formatting, and wrote a quick-and-dirty Python script to ‘scrape’ the figures I needed from each document in the batch and summarize it to me in a usable output table. I’d managed to process around 200 of the 1,200 files in a matter of seconds… for reference, it would’ve taken an average employee a few hours, minimum, to sift through 200 of these babies. By adapting the script to other batches (each with slightly different formatting), I’d automated nearly all of the grunt work I’d been assigned.
I felt accomplished. I’d successfully put my brain to work, engineered a unique solution for a unique problem, optimized/automated a process that otherwise would’ve taken ages, saved precious time, and made life smoother for everyone involved.
That is what Computer Science is all about, right there. Using technology to engineer solutions to real-world problems? Breaking a big, time-consuming problems into tiny, easy-to-digest pieces? Optimizing a process that once took hours down into minutes? Improving the quality of life for everyone involved?
THAT’S Computer Science.
That’s what it’s all about.
NickGiovanni.com 