An Aspiring Software Engineer's Superhero Origin Story
23 Jan 2020
A common dream
If someone were to ask what reason made me join the computer science program at the University of Hawaii, I wouldn’t want to answer them. Like many of my peers, I came into the major because of my interests in video games. I don’t have a specific video game title that could be the sole cause of pushing my life in its current direction. Instead, this interest spurs from the collection of titles released during the early 2000s. Seeing many game companies becoming successful and making a lot of money throughout the 2000s inspired me to enroll in U.H. as a Computer Science major. My game plan at the time was to get a computer science degree, then start working as a game designer at one of the popular companies, like Valve or Mojang.
Exposure to academics
Like all plans, my desired career path changed when I came into contact with the ICS program at U.H. at Manoa. At first, I was disinterested in the required introductory classes of the program. “Using Java and learning discrete math isn’t necessary to becoming a game developer!,” I thought. After contemplating for some time, I slowly began to saw how my classes, despite being unrelated, could help me to reach my desired career. Each computer science topic, like memory management and algorithms, provides a foundation of general programming that I could use in actual game programming.
Realization through practical experiences
The clubs organized by fellow CS students also help me develop my goal into a more practical career plan. By participating in a club like the Associate for Computing Machinery at Manoa, I was able to observe other possible career options. In my time at the Grey Hats at Manoa, I participated cyber defense competitions, where participants have to administrate and maintain a computer system against real attackers. Collaborating, screwing around, and failing spectacularly to secure a system is, surprisingly, more fun to me than working in the game industry. When comparing being a game developer to a system administrator, working through stressful crunches and being exploited by game publishers wasn’t as appealing.
The result
After my experience of studying computer science in an academic setting, my new goal is to try as many things as possible. I would still learn about game development, but now I’m more open to learning other topics, such as software engineering, web design, and machine learning. My current plan is to join other clubs, like the Programming and Algorithms club, and aim to participate in competitions and hackathons, like ICPC and Global Game Jam.
