Hey there and welcome to my site! I'm currently a third year undergrad student studying a combined major of computer science and microbiology and immunology at the University of British Columbia (UBC), but only recently did I integrate computer science into my degree.
A major determining point in a student's life is during major declaration because for some, this single decision determines where you devote most of your time in the years to come. According to withfrank.org (the first search result on google :P), ~80% of college students end up changing the major they initially chose and I found myself amongst these students. Ever since I started high school, I never once considered myself a "computer kid" because I perceived the field to be too difficult for me before I even tried it and even when I got to university, I told myself that I would never take a computer science class. As a result, I spent my first year mainly experimenting with chemistry and biology and at the end of first year, I decided to major in microbiology and immunology, still relatively unsure of what I wanted to do with my life.
To my surprise (to fulfill a graduation requirement), I ended up taking a introductory computational thinking course in the summer of 2020 (CPSC 100!), which finally gave me an insight into what computer science had to offer. Funny enough, I ended up coming back to the course as an undergraduate Teaching Assistant on 3 occasions since my time as a student there and that was probably what planted the idea in my brain that maybe computer science was something that I could see myself doing.
The cool thing about my program is that it offers a combined major route that integrates computer science into the degree and for the first time, I was seriously considering making the transfer (to be eligible, I only had to catch up on one course). After doing some research online in addition to pestering my computer science friends and profs (mainly asking if there was too much to catch up on), I decided to take the risk and use the remaining time I had to switch out my elective classes for the pre-req CPSC course (CPSC 110) and send in an application to update my major. Fast forward a few months and a few major events happened:
By the time third year came around, I'd already made up my mind that computer science was something that I would like to pursue (even over microbiology and immunology) and I had already obtained a broad understanding in many aspects of the field. However, I knew that I was still a latecomer among students who discovered their CPSC passion way earlier in their lives, so I started projects as soon as I could. As of writing this post, this website is the largest scale project that I've worked on and I'm proud to say that through Udemy, Youtube and of course StackOverFlow (:P), I've gained an introductory understanding for how frontend functions with a definite interest to learn more!
And that's where I stand today! I'm aware that I'm still nowhere near caught up with some of my peers but I've come to realize that it's okay to be behind and I'm still proud of how far I've come in my computational journey (and what's in store for me :))! In the future, I'll try to keep this page updated with a variety of types of entries with not only career advancements but also recaps of memorable experiences, yearly recaps, funny memes, and anything else that I feel deserves a write-up. If you've read this far, thanks for reading the first entry in my blog! :D
And if I'm the only one who reads these posts, then at least I'll have something funny to look back on in the future! (Hello future Byron! This is 20 year me xP)