Kathrine

Thank you for joining me today. Would you mind introducing yourself and your field of study?

Andrew

Yeah, my name is Andrew Wang and I'm a freshman at the University of Washington majoring in computer science.

Kathrine

Awesome. Was there a specific class, project camp, or other experience that first sparked your interest in computer science?

Andrew

I would say that throughout high school we experienced like things like ChatGPT, these types of resources that weren't available to us before. So I wanted to learn more about how these types of things worked since they were so like prominent in use in our everyday lives.

Kathrine

Can you walk me through your path into your current field starting from high school? Like what classes, clubs, internships, etc mattered the most?

Andrew

So my path, our school didn't really offer too much specialized routes for certain majors. So our school is an IB school. So we had this thing called IB Diploma.

And for us, that program runs through our junior and senior year. And that's the path I took. And the course that I took specifically there was IB Computer Science HL.

Although it wasn't, it didn't go too deep into sort of the stuff that I wanted to learn and more covered the basics of just coding and that type of that area. So that was my sort of high school experience. I also joined some STEM clubs such as Math Club.

And I also helped found the Web and AI Club at our school where I got to dive deeper into like ML and just sort of teach the students basic calculus and how that's involved in machine learning.

Kathrine

Did you participate in something like a summer internship or job?

Andrew

I didn't have like in any internships. I was more like volunteering for like some just like tutoring in math.

Kathrine

Can you describe a specific project or a problem you worked on or are working on?

Andrew

Something that I worked on was I wanted to learn more about how AWS works and how its cloud works. So I started some sort of projects where I would utilize the back end in AWS, such as there's this video game called Valorant. And you can use Python and look at the APIs for like usernames and names since each player has a specific UUID, which is just sort of a code for their specific tag for them.

And then you can use the API to grab the UUID and get their stats from their like previous games. And you can store that the recently grabbed data store in the cloud for easy access and sort of speed up the search process for certain usernames. So I got to learn more about how the back end works in that area.

Kathrine

Next, instead of describing your field generally, could you walk me through a real day in your life as a college student in computer science?

Andrew

Since our school is still in session, most of my time is currently prepping just for, I guess, finals and just our classes themselves. So usually I'll just like wake up, go to classes and finish my classes, go do something else productive, like maybe like hit the gym, spend some time with friends, do some homework, and then just try to figure out what I need to get done for the day. And I would say like a really key part of that is just being able to balance your time between your academics as well as your social life sense.

It's good not to focus too much on one thing.

Kathrine

And if you could go back, what advice would you give to your ninth grade self?

Andrew

I would say to focus on things that are just outside of school as well, since I didn't really know like the resources that were available to me when I was in high school. So I would, I was focusing like a lot more just on like my GPA, my classes. I would say to explore more about just online, see what you can find.

There's like a ton of certificates and videos and courses out there that you can take to sort of improve your knowledge about what you want to do, instead of just focusing all your time on like studying or just trying to, or just like going out with friends. Just try to figure out what's available to you.

Kathrine

For computer science or something related, are there any specific courses that you would recommend?

Andrew

Yeah, I mean online there's like just a ton of resources. Like I know Anthropic has some good courses. GitHub has like its foundations course.

And then like, yeah, AWS has like just a ton of certificates that you can go through, Google Cloud, and then Microsoft Learn. They all have so many great resources. I would just recommend looking up, maybe just searching up just on YouTube, what certificates to go for based on what you want to specialize in, that can vary based, since the courses that you want to take can vary based on what you're interested in.

Kathrine

And finally, what is one small step a student can take this month to explore your field?

Andrew

I would say that something that deters a lot of students from going into this field is just being able to have like the background knowledge, since a lot of CS also derives from math. And you have to know like a decent amount of calculus, like all that stuff for like machine learning and computer science. So I would say start small if you don't know the basics.

So maybe just go on something like Khan Academy or YouTube, just learn about the basic math behind this first before jumping into all that complicated stuff about like machine learning, neural networks, gradient descent, all that. Just start small, learn about derivatives, integrals. There's some like great resources out there like YouTube, like 3Blue1Brown, they explain things really well.

I would say utilize those resources and learn the small things before moving on to the bigger things.

Kathrine

Okay, so that's it. Thank you so much for taking the time to do this interview, and it was really helpful.

Andrew

Thank you for having me.