As the semester progresses and classes are really getting to the heart of their respective subjects, I've noticed that two of my classes especially have quite strong parallels.

The two in question are Data Structures and my political philosophy class, and the more I think about it, the more I see the similarities in them. There is a certain duality to philosophy that mirrors that reminds me of the binary aspects of computer science. They both have an innate sense of balance within them, a sort of "zen" if you will.

Hello dear reader!

As the semester comes to an end, many of you may be looking eagerly towards summer vacation. Perhaps you have an internship lined up or are involved in research for the upcoming months. But even if you don't have a specifically structured plan, there are still many ways to be immersed in computer science on your time.

Hello dear reader!

With midterms week just around the corner and projects piling up, I think everyone is feeling pretty frenzied. And with that, I've been thinking a lot about what exactly it is that computer scientists do, and I think I may have figured it out.

We fail.

It's true! I don't know if anyone has ever written even a marginally complicated program without the compiler finding something wrong with it. CS is all about finding your errors, fixing them, and then getting twenty new errors for your trouble.

Hello dear reader!

I hope you all have had a wonderful weekend! I, for my part, had a lot of fun this weekend as I participated in my first ever 24 hour hackathon at the WiCS (Women in Computer Science) Hackathon.

Hello dear reader!

If you're a college student reading this, you probably don't realize, or even care for that matter, that for high school seniors, the deadline for college decisions is quickly coming up. And with that, all my younger friends are calling me up for advice on all things college.

While talking to them, I came to remember the person I was when I was in their shoes last year, and realized that even though I have only been in college for a year, I've  already changed so much.

Hello dear reader!

Last weekend, I volunteered at UT's Girl Day as part of the Introduce a Girl to Engineering initiative. For my part, I taught girls as young as seven how to design their own mobile apps.

This semester, I've really been trying to get more involved in volunteering and outreach. So last month, I joined an all-women team in the computer science department that focuses on recruiting girls, especially high school seniors, for UTCS. Efforts for this cause include sending postcards, calling, emailing, and hosting an event just for prospective girls at ExploreUT (the computer science program at ExploreUT itself will be filled with amazing events for anyone interested).

Hello dear reader!

As this semester's career fair has come and gone, I hope you all had a great and successful experience. For my part, even though it was only my second career fair, I thought my confidence and comfort levels were exponentially higher at last week's fair than they were at last semester's.

Hello dear reader!

This weekend I went to MADcon, the UT Mobile App Development Conference, and learned so much from the experience. We kicked off the event with keynote speaker Tom Bishop, who has worked at Bell Labs, been the VP of Tech at Unix and the CTO of many Austin startups. Bishop gave a lot of great advice in his speech, but the one thing that really stuck in my mind was his entreating us to "fail fast." 

I have come to learn that one of the most primary tenets in the field of computer science is the breaking down of a problem. Making a complex problem or system into smaller parts that are easier to understand and program is essential in computer science, and something that I was taught to do on the first day of class. In fact, even in elementary school, we were taught to not focus on a large project as a whole, but work through it bit by bit so as not to be overwhelmed by the task.