August 2023 to June 2024
It was nice to see Mabel, Colin, and Anthony again from last year. I remember from last year that I resonated a lot with Colin because he goes to UCSD and he is majoring in Mechanical Engineering which was the major I wanted to do. I remember him talking about how APCSP and APCSA helped him with his exposure to agile and everything else. I didn’t think that I would resonate with anyone else on the panel, but after today’s I found that I resonated a little more with Mabel this time because her current major is Cognitive Science: Machine Learning and Neural Computation. This is the current major that I am looking into for UCSD, and my primary desired major is Mechanical Engineering. I think that Mabel was very helpful in helping me to finalize my majors for UCSD and it seems that Data Science or Cognitive Science both seem like good options. It was nice to see that Tristan got very invested into Computer Science. It is important to have some tangibles, or having things deployed, it is important that you have many different projects. I remember last year, Anthony highly reccommended doing a lot of LeetCode, and I did not really do any of it nor look at it, but I know how hard Java is, so maybe now I should sign up for LeetCode and do it. I also want to look into Vercel as a lot of people in my class have been using it such as Theo, Rohin, and Rachit. I have heard it is very easy to use and helps a lot with github-pages, maybe I can ask my team to consider using it.
Tristan’s Cheat Codes:
The Q&A was very informative, and I should remember the YouTube Channel HyperPlexed and maybe watch some videos sometimes. I think that I can try and get an internship after my senior year or even during the second half of my internship because I can use that on my resume and show excitement. I know that it is very hard in order to get into a good college. Afterwards, I spoke with Colin and Mabel about my major because I want Mechanical Engineering and Cognitive Science: Machine Learning and Neural Computation.
I think that I should really consider going into coding more and I really have wanted to make this project about electric vehicles. I believe that the tools mentioned by Tristan could really help me with my development, and I want to use Svelte, but I also really want to try and make a website from complete scratch that looks professional because then I would really gain a lot of experience from that and I would know how the website works and where what elements are. I think that as an aspiring Mechanical Engineer, I should consider exploring more about Computer Science and try to ask more questions about it. I have learned much from this panel, and I even learned more after the panel, when I got to talk to Colin and Mabel about their college application process, and why they chose they majors that they did.
Overall, similar to last year this alumni panel has really helped me to consider learning more computer science and make it more a part of my daily routine. I find that this will be important for my future and any jobs that I want. However, it is different than last year, because as a CSP student, I did not know much about coding, but now, after listening to these alumni speak again, as a current CSA student, I now know how much this really means to work hard in Computer Science and to try and take away as much as you can from the class because it can have so much unexpected benefits. I will try and focus a lot more on the coding portion of Computer Science this year and try to get more involved with Backend because most of my friends like Aidan and Rohan are doing things that I have no idea how to start. I want to learn how to do deployment, and I hope I am able to do that throughout the year and even through LeetCode. I really do hope that CSA will help me to become a better student, and that this trimester, with my new bigger group of people, I am able to absorb new information from each member and make me a more knowledgeable person in the area of Computer Science