CS Mentoring 2020 (Theme Week)

     On April 14, 2020, the CS/CTE day of theme week was going on. As part of CS/CTE day, we had 4 guest speakers from the Nuevo Foundation, an organization teaching kids about STEM, hold a webinar and share their unique experiences or knowledge on STEM. The first speaker's name was Katelyn and she talked about how she got interested in CS. She said how messing around with the HTML of her Tumblr page and playing with robots inspired her to go to college for robotics, however, once she was done with college, she found out she liked architecture and OS better and went down a career path in that. What I most took away from her presentation is her advice for college and career, specifically how I don't need to know specific programming languages, fancy equipment, or an expensive college to be successful in CS. While I do know one programming language, I could know more about it in-depth and it may not be useful for some of the things I want to have a career path in, like AI, but I was assured as long as I know the concept behind programming, I can easily pick up the language I need and do what I want to do. I don't have the means to acquire fancy equipment or go to an expensive college but I was also assured as long as I work hard with what I have and make the best use of it, I can go places.

    2 other speakers that spoke were Alyda, who worked in product design, and Madeleyne, who works with firmware. Though Alyda spoke more about applying to college, something I've already done, something I still took away from her presentation was that I can do things that are not necessarily STEM-related even if I go to college for STEM. From Madeleyne, the idea that you may not know if you like or don't like something until doing it was reasserted, talking about how she also went to college for robotics like Katelyn but found firmware more appealing. The last speaker, however, was my favorite as I learned the most from him and he was pretty funny at times. His name was Eduardo and he talked about how video games were his gateway into an interest in tech. He then elaborated on various general settings of games, such as how anti-aliasing makes graphics look better and smooth but at the cost of processor efficiency, how ambient occlusion is responsible for shadows and making things look real, and v sync makes the video run smooth. I learned a lot of technical things I didn't hear of before and I see myself using this on things like Photoshop or game developing.
     In all, I learned some valuable information from these presenters. I learned about technical information I can see myself using for CS jobs I get in the future, especially jobs that have to do with media design or game development. I also learned general information and advice about what pursuing a CS higher education and career is like, such as how I may not know what I actually want to do at first or how I could incorporate non-CS things into my CS life. In fact, it is not knowing what I want to do in life until doing it which may be the most important to my life right now since I still have much to experience about the world and this knowledge tells me I should always be curious and try new things - I might just find something I really want to do for the rest of my life.