What I Want From Computer Science
24 Jan 2019
Why I Became Interested in Computer Science
As a kid, I can’t say that I was really interested in coding. At the time, it just sounded like this imaginary thing that was made up to be this thing that was super complicated and unfathomable to be able to explain how things work when it was too hard to explain otherwise. In other words, to me, it was like magic. But then, around middle school time, I started to play games more often and I even played this game called Team Fortress 2 on my computer. The gameplay isn’t too important to detail but the game introduced me to something, a console. I was brought to that because I wanted to mess around with cheats, and I found that the way to put in cheat codes in that game was no button combination, but through a command prompt. Around this time, I was also playing Minecraft, and I also learned that cheats worked in a similar way, but I was also building things in the game and I thought I was pretty creative, so I had the idea that in the future, I would make things.
Enough about games, onto school
Well, the games gave me a tiny idea of what coding can look like, but more importantly, I started to realize that building things didn’t only have to include buildings, but also things like websites, applications, and even video games! Skip to my senior year of high school, and I signed up for a S.T.E.M. class, and I learned things like basic website building and making circuits. I wasn’t really good at making circuits, but I thought making websites was actually fun. I enjoyed being able to make something that was made out of logic and to design things with mathematical precision. Towards the end of the year, my class was assigned to do group projects, making anything we wanted with what we learned. My group decided to make a game. Awesome! It was a 2D platformer that we made using a game building program. Well, almost made it, a couple weeks before the project was due, the entire project was lost on my computer. I was so frustrated, I stayed after school for a couple of hours three days a week, but at least my teacher gave my group credit for the project. It ended poorly, but before I lost everything, the project felt really fun and satisfying to do. I was especially excited for the mechanics of the game, thinking that the movement felt smooth and had relatively good stage design.
Now I am in college
Going into college, I was thinking that I had to choose a major that I would enjoy, especially since I would have to spend four more years of school studying in that field. I was deciding between either engineering or computer science, since I thought that creating things would be fun. In the end, I chose computer science because I have become more involved with programs than buildings. Right now, I am studying computer science and it feels like a grind, where I am learning about so many small yet complicated details; but in the process of writing this essay, I realized that I forgot why I thought coding was so fun in the first place, to make something. It has been a while since I ran a program that involves pictures, I have just been making programs that represent data structures. Hopefully, in my upcoming semesters, I’ll be able to make a game or website that will make me remember what kinds of things that I wanted make with code in the first place.