I started my freshman year of Computer Science at UIUC this past fall, and in the past five months I’ve been on campus, I really enjoy every moment I’m there.

The biggest difference I’ve noticed between high school classes and college classes is depth. The material that you learn in college is so much more interesting because the course focuses on a more specific topic within that field of study. Take quantum mechanics. This is a class where we learn one of the fundamental oddities of the quantum world: how two things can exist in two different states at the same time. College courses allow me to experience the full depth of the material because of the time we can put into classes.

Outside of class, I’ve also gotten a job as a full stack web developer for the Cognitive Computation Group. This has also been a very enjoyable experience for me as I take a step back from so many web development frameworks and start from the basics, like PHP. I’ve also had the opportunity to learn more about server configuration and the issues that can go along with that.

UIUC was filled with career fairs, technical interviews, and free t-shirts. I talked to a lot of companies, handed out a lot of resumes, and got a lot of free swag in return. There were so many events and opportunities hosted by the student computer science organizations on campus to help look over resumes or prepare for technical interviews.

I’m excited to announce that I will be working at NextCapital in Chicago this coming summer as a full stack web developer. NextCapital helps both consumers and partners track their money, classifying their assets by bringing all of their accounts in one place.

My goals at this company are to continue getting experience in the real world by taking business requirements and transforming them into technology solutions. I hope to gain more confidence by writing and testing good code and pushing it into production, where real consumers can benefit from my code.

I hope I can take what I’m learning, data structures and computer architecture, and begin to apply it to the real world.