That could be me in a year!

     Here I comment on the Alumni Symposium. My class schedule this semester did not allow me to attend this time, so the only thing I know of it is the speaker lineup. I'll mainly comment on a symposium I attended a couple of years ago. The first thing I want to mention is that the age of the speakers is vastly different. The symposium I attended earlier in my college career featured many older graduates, mostly from the graduating classes before 2000, whereas the recent symposium had several students who graduated within the past couple of years. Many of them stayed in Charleston as well. Most of the speakers talked about their job, and there was one who spoke of graduate school. I remember one speaker worked in the defense industry and spoke of the potential of jobs in the security sector. There was another interesting alumni who apparently did not originally graduate with a computer science degree. He was a construction worker for a long time, but realized that he didn't want to be doing it his whole life and went back to school for computer science. You would never guess that he was a computer scientist by looking at him, which just proves the saying "You can't judge a book by its cover." Dr. Starr said that he did all of the homework problems at the back of the book instead of just the ones that were assigned as he was really committed to his education and making it work for him. He was probably the most impressive speaker to me. The last speaker that I remember was a graduate student, I think going for his Masters degree, who specialized in optimization of the workstation, or something similar. I think I remember that he was all about having multiple monitors in some particular orientation to maximize productivity. At the time, I remember thinking that it seemed kind of silly, because everyone knows that having two monitors over one increases productivity. We employ this strategy at the helpdesk, the lab was recently implemented it, and at the time, I thought it was already pretty much common knowledge.

     I'm not sure I personally identify with any of the speakers that I remember. I don't see myself going to graduate school, or at least not right after I get my Bachelor's degree. I don't think I'd like the security sector that much, although I'm sure your job would also be very secure if you were in that industry. I want to somehow contribute to society with my skills. I don't mean to say that programming jobs don't contribute, because surely they do, in one way or another, but I mean in a sense that makes the world a better, easier, more healthy, or environmentally friendly place to live. Not just work for a random for-profit company that writes and provides program x to a particular market. I think I made a post last semester about the point of sale software that Papa John's uses. I don't want to be on the team that writes programs like that, I want to be on the team that writes, for example, software that helps reduce emissions, or guides solar energy panels during different weather conditions for the maximum output. Maybe not in a year, but some day, I hope.