Cal Lutheran Stories

Majors: Computer Science, Mathematics

What kinds of opportunities have you found in the Computer Science program? 

My impression of the department is that the professors very much care for your success and want you to learn and understand the material, but they’re not going to babysit you. They want the student to be fully responsible for there own work, as being a self-starter and being able to follow through on an assignment is extremely important to being a computer scientist. By far, I feel my initiative to start projects and ask questions when I didn’t understand concepts has been why I’ve done well so far.

Side projects, and the desire to work on stuff just for fun, is really important. It’s the reason I know I picked the right major. One of the greatest things about CLU is how available the staff has been for me. I always feel bad about “bothering” them about my side projects I do for fun, but a common response I’ve gotten, from more then one professor, has been “If the door is open, I’m in office hours”, inviting me to come in and ask about questions I have, even when I’m not in a class with said professor.

I also managed to land an internship early second semester of my sophomore year with a company called Spirent. They do a lot of network testing, and my main job was to test the software to be used on the testing cards (yes, I tested the testing equipment). I would say my experience with the Computer Science department at CLU very well prepared me, especially since the used a different programming language but I was still able to catch on thanks to my strong programming background.

What has inspired you at Cal Lutheran?

Being a Mathematics and Computer Science double Major, I am simply inspired by the idea that I can take a mathematical concept (be it complex or simple) and try to use my programming experience to either simulate or calculate my topic of interest. I think the biggest inspiration I’ve received from a class here at CLU was Computer Graphics with Dr. Reinhart. In the class, we utilized some Linear Algebra tricks to perform some pretty cool graphical manipulations. For example, my favorite two topics were rotating cubes and performing lighting effects on a sphere. The math and programming behind them required some amount of time and patience, but it was very worth while.

Besides that, almost every Math class I’ve taken has given me most of my project ideas. That’s really my motive for wanting to program, asking “mathy” questions and wanting to see what the power of Computer Science can do.

What has surprised you about your experience?

I am really impressed with all the help I’ve gotten from the faculty at Cal Lutheran. They are very helpful and have been very inspiring to me. They have helped me whether I didn’t understand a concept in class, or if I just wanted to gain a deeper understanding of the material by exploring concepts not covered in class.

What’s next for you?

I am a double major, in Mathematics and Computer Science. While I love Computer Science and programming, my interests lie in learning more about Mathematics. So I plan to go to Graduate School in Mathematics, and while I am unsure of what I truly want to do, I am very interested in using programming as a tool to do some very complicated mathematical concepts. Well, that’s not entirely true – sometimes the easier ideas are fun and overly rewarding.