I don’t remember if I was just ignorant or immature. I can’t choose, and I won’t let others choose. Growing up, the words of ‘robotics’ or ‘programming’ seemed so foreign to what we were growing up with. Do sports or do math or maybe learn a foreign language. STEM on the other hand, it seemed like something related to science classes in middle and high school, but many of our fellow classmates didn’t know what it was. We weren’t given as much exposure here in Hawaii compared to the Continental US. So, when I finally heard of the world of robotics, cyber, coding, and engineering, it was all fairly new to many of us in highschool. We treated it like the dark arts or something people would be miserable over. It was only in these recent years that there was this push to spread information of what STEM really was. Software Engineering and programming seemed so foreign just five years ago, now it seems to be what everyone wants to see on your resume. I for one saw the growing importance of computers, the internet, engineering, and software development/engineering. My interest grew as it seemed these were the only ways you could survive in our fast paced world. People started to need websites to house information or advertisements to advertise products. Even the archaic system of the military has started their slow and untimely push to acquire talent in programmers and cybersecurity professionals. I guess the dawn of 2010 has really opened up a new world of software engineering and other STEM fields to me. I guess it could be the advent of the internet, or the crisis of breaches in cyber infrastructure, or just many hours I spent playing games rather than doing my homework that has drawn my interest into software engineering.
Looking around me, all my peers seem years ahead of me. They’ve spent their teenage years fiddling with software and hardware while I spent my time doing sports, band, and regular classes in highschool. Oh, I regret so much for joining this field of study. It seems that my experiences in band or team sports or even in AP English are no help in this new field. I have always felt behind my peers in terms of technical knowledge; my knowledge of other things gained from my experiences outside such as exercise, military service, church, instruments and band seem to be worthless. This is why I am in this field and in this class. I am here to develop my weaknesses and to learn something that is different from how I would think.
In this class and future classes, I hope to learn technical and practical skills such as programming, mathematics, physics, and engineering. These types of experiences are what would rewire a brain in terms of the logical process of approaching problems and solutions. It seems that this is the only way to better yourself professionally and mentally. To be able to think like our great predecessors such as Archimedes, Isaac Newton, Einstein and more famous engineers and scientists is the only way to attempt to transcend and be something greater. I’ve always dreamt of doing something great. It seems all men have this in common, even though people would argue otherwise. I feel that all men dream ambitiously… They all feel this urge, even if we feel content, one time in our lives that we wished we could be like Alexander the Great or Napoleon Bonaparte. Having these skillsets from software engineering is just one path to all our dreams.
I’ve already failed my first challenges in this class. I’ve been lamenting on whether to quit or to push forward. I’ve decided to push forward because I see no other path then that of moving forward. It’s do or die. This is the only way I see it. I must learn Javascript, HTML, CSS, IntelliJ and other languages or methods that this class promises to teach. One day in the future, I will look back on this essay and either laugh or cry.