I constantly felt mired in confusion when I was in undergrad – about what worked, what didn’t, what I actually wanted. To be fair, as a tech nerd who grew up in Omaha and decided to do CS at University of Nebraska on a whim, it’s unsurprising in retrospect. At the time though, I just felt consumed by frenzy and panic – the job market, the industry, all of it was confusing – and no one in my life knew anything about it.

In my naivete, CS was my only plan for undergrad – and as an avid coder throughout my childhood, it served as my entire world. All of my chips were placed on a single roulette number, it seemed. And yet, in my first few years of undergrad, all I could think to myself was: “I’m wading through a foggy swamp and I don’t have the faintest clue where I’m going! Shit, shit, shit!”

All there was to do was blindly search the haze and hope I would find my metaphorical pot of gold. Too bad there was no rainbow to chase the end of.

Thankfully at the freshman career fair, I caught a lucky break. Northrop Grumman sent a team to the fair – they worked on a web project for the Air Force at Offutt. I won’t regale you with the details of it, but the skinny is that it auto generated Weekly and Daily briefings for officers – something like that. My personal website back then looked straight up heinous, being a pure HTML/CSS/Javascript demo I threw together, but they forgave that. Given that we were all in Nebraska, they couldn’t afford to be picky about their interns! Long story short, I picked up web dev knowledge on Angular at the end of a fun summer, thanks to a Good Boss™ – his name’s Mark. Even when I received the return offer, he strongly suggested I apply to as many companies as possible before accepting it. Even then I appreciated how kind that input was.

Early the fall after, I found myself looking at the internship postings, flooded with intimidation. I enjoyed an early good resume line, sure, but a lot of kids have those.
And I still had that horrid website!

Then, I experienced my sophomoric epiphany: “I can make a good website now – one that actually shows my decent skills!”

Using my new Angular skills, before I knew it I saw a website in front of me, markedly less amateurish before – and all mine.
I got some cool internships after that – and I lowkey owe my current life to sophomore little me throwing that website together.

Unfortunately though, the website then languished for a few years as I began chasing my PhD in Autonomous Vehicles. Research is going well, and I’m learning a lot, but a few weeks ago, I went to my old website and realized I felt similar to how I did when I initially created it. Furthermore, I didn’t need a website to flex my web dev skills – I needed a website that showcases me and my vision. One I could regularly update too, without wading into code again and again.

Over the next week I’ll be putting this together, showing my work in Autonomous Vehicles and how I’m hard at work making the field less opaque and safer for everyone. I’ll probably post some life stuff too.
All praise WordPress!