Electrical Engineering..?

I'm in midst of finals "week" (it's just two days). But with so much time left for studying due to lack of assignments, I've been able to explore some more majors. Especially with college applications in a year, I think it's about time.

whole lotta yap, I'll get to the point eventually

humble beginnings

I always knew I was going to do SOMETHING with coding. I've spent so long that programming has become something like another language to me.

My first introduction to programming was when I was only 9, where I learned JavaScript at a summer camp through CodeCombat. I convinced my parents to subscribe and I think I ended up doing a lot of web development and Python. But in all honesty, this was definitely not the greatest introduction. They use their own library for all implementations, and when I actually started real python, I was compeltely lost. A 9 year old's brain is not apt to generalize.

In the time between the summer I was 9 and summer I was 10, I didn't really focus on coding. I downloaded Visual Studio on my laptop for fun, but I had no idea how to use it. I remember my first lines of C++ being #pragma once instead of std::cout << "Hello, world!"; because I was copying my dad's code. I copied an entire function, in fact, but had no idea how it worked. For basically all other times, I played Roblox. I can't really remember my younger years that well.

Then, when I was 10, I was introduced to competitive programming. Embarrassingly enough, I actually started USACO when I was 10, and yet am still in silver at the age of 16. But it's a bit expected considering I didn't solve any problems and would just sit in class. Competitive programming is all about practice.

I continued these weekly Saturday morning coding classes for a long time. Early on in the class, I copy pasted a Snake game tutorial I saw on YouTube and thought it was the coolest thing ever. In sixth grade, I tried learning HTML from w3schools, tried Python yet again, and made my first Discord bot! I ran it on my Raspberry Pi that my dad gifted me, and did development via both SSH and Git. There was a lot of spoon-feeding and hand-holding going on here, but I'm just glad there was a product. It would take many years before I finally learned enough about Linux to actually understand.

Finally, after 4 years, in the 2024 January contest, I finally promoted to Silver! Took me long enough. And to be honest---I didn't even practice that much. It was probably like 20 problems done over winter break. Big regrets on not studying when I was younger, who knows where I could be now.

indecisiveness

But once in high school, college apps would be mentioned every day. So naturally, I looked for potential majors. When I was 7, I told everyone I wanted to be a physicist. Did I know anything? No. My dad bought my a physics comic and it looked cool. When I was 8, I told everyone I wanted to be an engineer. When I was 10, I told everyone I was going to be a computer scientist, study at MIT, then work at Microsoft. That really was my main goal for a long time before I realized that there's more than just Microsoft. I live right next to an entire Microsoft city though, so that was justified. And I also figured out that there's more schools than just MIT.

But what did I think in high school? All my middle school years I knew coding would be a part of my life somehow (this is pre-vibecoding era). In my freshman year, I wanted to do aerospace engineering. It's something my dad pursued for undergrad, and I just figured it'd be interesting. I never explored it enough, the passion just died out. It died out on a late night UW MyPlan browse. I knew I was going to do something with CS, so I was looking at the programs that the Allen Schol offered. A program along the lines of neural computation and engineering (that might actually be the exact name, but I'm not sure) appeared. Not a major, but still interesting. Neuroscience was pretty cool anyway, so I put that on my list.

What's interesting though is I always had some interest in med, depsite my fear of hospitals. Whenever I get sick at any magnitude, I search up possible causes. I've thought that my minor right abdominal pain could be appendicitis so many times that I actually learned a bit about how it's treated. This also was the same for orthodontics and neurosurgery (though these two were things I explored just this year). I skim random papers and books about medical topics I find interesting, but never get a deep understanding of it anyway. Not sure why I do this---I still remember reading a giant book on paramedicine at the Bellevue Library when I was 8. I don't even think I was reading, I was just looking at pictures.

So naturally, neural computation is something that interested me. Bioengineering and biomedical engineering were more braud, so I figured that I could pursue that.

I had no idea about anything in neural computation, though. That was until I saw a video from Neuralink about how they're implanting the BCIs, and that's when I realized that BCI is genuinely something I could enjoy. My science fair project in my sophomore year was just a comparative review of different types of BCIs. It wasn't supposed to win anything, it was just a way to motivate me to read more about this topic. So, leaning into this new niche, I started studying ML/DL and Python! And I'm definitely still interested in BCIs, but perhaps in a different way.

systems

When I started, I wasn't actually interested in pursuing systems as a career. I picked up Linux because my battery life was terrible, and picked up Arch because it looked the coolest. I started on KDE Plasma before discovering Hyprland. Then, I started with premade HyDE dotfilesdual booted with Windows before basically just forking binnewbs's dotfiles. For the latter, I bought a Thinkpad T495 off a friend. Finally, I ventured into making my own dotfiles, though I basically hit a wall after getting the bare minimums setup because I bought a mac (battery life is so good on this I can't).

Even though I didn't do too much with Linux, I learned a lot about the underlying systems and commands and all that. So when I was taking 391 this summer, most commands were something I used to use daily.

electrical engineering..?

Now, when I first learned that this existed, I thought it was some sort of special plumber. I thought of electricians and people coming to fix your breaker box (no offense meant, I was ignorant).

But throughout this summer quarter, I've come to terms with electrical engineering. Especially the computer engineering side of it. As much as I love studiyng the math behind classical machine learning, studying how a computer just works is also just fascinating. Knowing that I have a couple cores just running around, managing so many processes is really cool! Although I feel like this topic is slowly dying out due to a new focus on building AI applications, hardware is definitely something that I find interesting. Lower level programming, too. I really enjoyed the x86-64 unit in 351 this quarter, and C is just a fun language (though this is not really low level).

All in all, I've once again changed my interest somehow. I guess it all ties back into BCIs, but I genuinely never thought I would leave this CS stuff and explore the actual computers themselves. It's still early, and I have a good sense of what I'll be doing, but the choice between CS, CE, and EE seems too complicated. Maybe I just apply to EECS programs, who knows. CS has been my passion for almost half my life, and I enjoy learning the mathematical theory behind ML, but I also do not want to be a math or applied mathematics major. Computer engineering is a good blend between the two, but I fear I miss out on some of the actual circuit workings. Electrical engineering might be too far away from CS. Perhaps the best bet for me is to do EECS or CS while taking some EE classes.

It's crazy how I had 90% intro for a short blurb on the actual topic. Maybe I should become a YouTuber.