Last week in English 1110.01, First Year English Composition, I had a paper due analyzing the primary source of my choice. I decided to go to the writing center in Smith Lab to help me with it and hopefully learn something. I wrote a rough draft and went through a couple rounds of editing before I went so that I did not have to waste time going over grammatical mistakes. Personally, I do have a stigma against seeking help. I think this comes from my engineering way of thinking: either it is good or it is not. Seeking help means to me that your work isn’t good and you’ve failed. Usually, I will only go to get help if I feel like I will not be able to figure it out on my own. Because of this and the fact that I have not really needed it, this was a new experience for me. I have only gone to seek help when I missed a significant amount of school. This was really only a couple of times and I just went to my dad for help with math. I knew coming into college that this would have to change and that I specifically needed help with writing. I do not think I was taught to write very well in high school. It was my plan to go and have the writing center help me on my first paper, so I did. They gave me a lot of great advice about how to strengthen my writing rather than just making corrections. This was exactly what I wanted and it was super helpful. When I went in I told them that and they did a really good job at gearing their critique. I think they helped me make a much better argument and hopefully helped me get a better grade. Most importantly, I feel better prepared for writing my best paper and what to think about in the writing process. I think the best advice I got was to really keep my thesis in mind when I write each supporting detail and argument. Going through my paper and doing this I think my argument became much more cohesive and convincing. For the most part, they helped me make these improvements by leading my to fixing it on my own by asking me questions. I think this is the best way to learn a skill meaningfully. I love that process which is why I think I would like to be a tutor. I have always thought that explaining something to people in a way that makes sense was a skill of mine. I think I got this skill from my parents; they are both teachers. If teachers were paid what they deserve, I would probably follow in their footsteps. I really like helping other people academically and I would love to make some money doing it. I want to get a math minor and I would love to tutor math or work as a teaching assistant.

On my first day at OSU, my roommate, who I had never met before, invited me to go to an ACM-W ice cream social in the number garden. All of the student leaders and other members were very welcoming quick to start conversations. Everybody there was excited to meet and get to know new members of the club and the Ohio State community. They asked about what I was interested in and immediately gave me advice on how to pursue those interests further. Upperclassmen in the club made it clear from the start that they were a resource to turn to for help and advice. I think this mindset of growth was so evident because of both the purpose of the club and the student leaders. The club has a foundation of inclusivity and welcoming. I joined the GroupMe for the club so I could stay up to date on meeting times and locations as well as to keep an ear open for other related opportunities. When they announced the second meeting, I got together with a couple other people on my floor to bring to the event. All of the student leaders in the club formally introduced themselves to the group then split us up into groups for ice-breakers. Everyone else there seemed just as excited and on board as I was; it was a fun environment. The next club event was a presentation by Northrop Grumman about how their company is involved in reverse engineering and how that relates to the field of computer science. The presentation was super interesting and very informative. He showed off Ghidra, an open source application created by the NSA for reverse engineering. First, he went over a basic example of using Ghidra to find an exploitable flaw in some demo code. The program asked for a 64 bit string input to register a new account but tried to store that information in a 32 bit variable. He explained that the remaining 32 bits of input could be used to insert a malicious shell program into the source code of the program that could have access to all kinds of secure information associated with account registering. After this, he stepped it up a lot with the second demo to a much more realistic example. The source code created by ghidra was stripped, meaning all of the values were non-descriptive and very hard to read. He showed how the application allowed the code to be split up into more readable sections and how this process allowed you to quickly build a better understanding of the program as a whole. Finally, he talked about something that I found super interesting: reverse engineering competitions. The second demo was actually an example problem from the largest of these competitions. Even though I only understood the problem at a very basic level, it’s definitely something that I’m interested in learning more about. ACM-W seems very passionate about creating opportunities to get involved and engaged with learning in the field of computer science. I can’t wait to continue my involvement with them.