Cumulative Reflection
Reflecting on the nearly four years that I have spent at Iowa State University, I realize that I have grown immensely as a person both technically and personally. Battling Crohn’s disease in high school, I stumbled into college as a Computer Engineering major with a lot to prove and a lot of ground to cover. It had been about 2 years since I had taken a math course and I had not had the chance to do any real prior programming. Despite this, I was determined to bring myself out of the ditch my medical condition put me in and prove to myself that I could complete my personal and academic goals. Almost four years later, I have made progress that my former self would be extremely impressed with. Despite a rocky start, I managed to land two monumental internship experiences with The MITRE Corporation, land research for the past year and a half with Dr. Chinmay Hegde, and complete several personal projects. As of Fall 2017, I have successfully brought my GPA to a 3.0, about a 1-point cumulative GPA improvement from when I start in Fall 2014.
If the past few years have shown anything about my work ethic, it is that I am an articulate, empathetic, self-starting, long-term solver of engineering problems. I am fortunate enough to have been afforded the opportunity to demonstrate these skills in my last two internships at The MITRE Corporation as well as during my ongoing undergraduate research assistantship with Electrical Engineering Professor Dr. Chinmay Hegde, where I am managing the agile development of a mobile-friendly, food recipe recommendation web app. There have also been a few projects worked on inside the classroom that have also allowed me to showcase my strong technical and communication skills.
The foundational knowledge that kickstarted my journey as a technically capable professional engineer commenced in my Java-based Data Structures course, where I studied and applied my knowledge Big O to aid in the test-driven implementation of key data structures such as stacks, lists, and trees. These foundational skills are what allowed me to be successful in the subsequent embedded systems course, where I led my team in implementing, in C, the object detection and Cartesian coordinate based object tracking algorithms necessary to aid a robot in the navigation of an obstacle course towards an endpoint, both manually (over Bluetooth UART) and autonomously.
After demonstrating a knack for problem solving and self-starting – also signified by the completion of a Raspberry Pi radio repeater project semesters prior – I was afforded the opportunity to apply my embedded programming and cyber security skills to collaborate with a team to develop, from scratch, a challenge that sought to have competitors uniquely identify Internet of Things (IoT) devices. To develop the challenge with reasonable difficulty and document accurately, I was tasked with studying and analyzing the ZigBee and Z-Wave protocol as well as reverse-engineering commercial and developmental IoT devices. My public speaking skills were later showcased during the technical deep-dives I collaborated with my team to give.
After completing another year of school, where my cyber security team won first place at the ISU Cyber Defense Competition, I went on to, as my supervisor put it, be “exceptional” in my contribution to my team’s project during the summer of 2017. I had been tasked with developing a Smart IoT Gateway running on a Linux virtual machine that fingerprinted IoT network traffic profiles, detected anomalies, and mitigated the problem to bolster network security.
Throughout all the team projects I’ve worked on, my ability to empathize, be open-minded, and be accountable has allowed me to grow into an excellent team player. Ultimately, with experience and skills gain over the year and with drive and determination I possess, I believe I sufficiently ready to be a part of the engineering work force.
If the past few years have shown anything about my work ethic, it is that I am an articulate, empathetic, self-starting, long-term solver of engineering problems. I am fortunate enough to have been afforded the opportunity to demonstrate these skills in my last two internships at The MITRE Corporation as well as during my ongoing undergraduate research assistantship with Electrical Engineering Professor Dr. Chinmay Hegde, where I am managing the agile development of a mobile-friendly, food recipe recommendation web app. There have also been a few projects worked on inside the classroom that have also allowed me to showcase my strong technical and communication skills.
The foundational knowledge that kickstarted my journey as a technically capable professional engineer commenced in my Java-based Data Structures course, where I studied and applied my knowledge Big O to aid in the test-driven implementation of key data structures such as stacks, lists, and trees. These foundational skills are what allowed me to be successful in the subsequent embedded systems course, where I led my team in implementing, in C, the object detection and Cartesian coordinate based object tracking algorithms necessary to aid a robot in the navigation of an obstacle course towards an endpoint, both manually (over Bluetooth UART) and autonomously.
After demonstrating a knack for problem solving and self-starting – also signified by the completion of a Raspberry Pi radio repeater project semesters prior – I was afforded the opportunity to apply my embedded programming and cyber security skills to collaborate with a team to develop, from scratch, a challenge that sought to have competitors uniquely identify Internet of Things (IoT) devices. To develop the challenge with reasonable difficulty and document accurately, I was tasked with studying and analyzing the ZigBee and Z-Wave protocol as well as reverse-engineering commercial and developmental IoT devices. My public speaking skills were later showcased during the technical deep-dives I collaborated with my team to give.
After completing another year of school, where my cyber security team won first place at the ISU Cyber Defense Competition, I went on to, as my supervisor put it, be “exceptional” in my contribution to my team’s project during the summer of 2017. I had been tasked with developing a Smart IoT Gateway running on a Linux virtual machine that fingerprinted IoT network traffic profiles, detected anomalies, and mitigated the problem to bolster network security.
Throughout all the team projects I’ve worked on, my ability to empathize, be open-minded, and be accountable has allowed me to grow into an excellent team player. Ultimately, with experience and skills gain over the year and with drive and determination I possess, I believe I sufficiently ready to be a part of the engineering work force.
General Education Reflection
To understand my careers goals, it is necessary to discuss what my personal goals are. When it comes time for me to go forever, I want to know that I have made a dent in this world – that I have fundamentally improved the baseline quality of at least life. I simply would not be satisfied with merely getting a job that pays at a rate that allows me to live comfortably. In other words, I would not be happy with simply existing on this planet. For my level of privilege, being good at what I do and getting a job would not be much of an achievement for me.
What has always mattered to me is what I decided to do with the experience, skills, resource, and connections that I possess and will continue to obtain. So, when it comes to my career goals, ideally, I would like to be doing something that makes a direct and meaningful positive impact to the lives of many. I would also like to be gaining skills in the position that I am working at that can be transferable to other areas in my life. It’s why I enjoyed working at MITRE and why I will continue to seek out companies with similar goals.
When it comes to the general education classes I took at Iowa State, whenever I could I would take classes that would allow me to better achieve my personal goals in life. Psychology 101 taught me many fundamental psychological concepts, but the ones that stuck with me the most were the concepts related to parenting and interacting. I’ve always wanted to be a good father to my kids, if I have them, and I am always looking for ways to improve how I interact with those around me. The World Food Issues class I took exposed me to issues we as humans have and currently still are facing in the agricultural food systems of the developed and developing world. It has opened my eyes wider to the causes and consequences of over-nutrition and under-nutrition, poverty, hunger, and access & distribution. Knowing and understanding the realities of the world outside of my own community is essential if I am trying to have the best shot at making the world a better place.
What has always mattered to me is what I decided to do with the experience, skills, resource, and connections that I possess and will continue to obtain. So, when it comes to my career goals, ideally, I would like to be doing something that makes a direct and meaningful positive impact to the lives of many. I would also like to be gaining skills in the position that I am working at that can be transferable to other areas in my life. It’s why I enjoyed working at MITRE and why I will continue to seek out companies with similar goals.
When it comes to the general education classes I took at Iowa State, whenever I could I would take classes that would allow me to better achieve my personal goals in life. Psychology 101 taught me many fundamental psychological concepts, but the ones that stuck with me the most were the concepts related to parenting and interacting. I’ve always wanted to be a good father to my kids, if I have them, and I am always looking for ways to improve how I interact with those around me. The World Food Issues class I took exposed me to issues we as humans have and currently still are facing in the agricultural food systems of the developed and developing world. It has opened my eyes wider to the causes and consequences of over-nutrition and under-nutrition, poverty, hunger, and access & distribution. Knowing and understanding the realities of the world outside of my own community is essential if I am trying to have the best shot at making the world a better place.