While writing this paper I interviewed three people about their experience in the computer science engineering (CSE) field. I interviewed an upperclassman Jacob Ferrara, a third year CSE major specializing in Software Engineering. I also interviewed a graduate student Jacob Spiegel who is the TA for engineering 1181.01 and 1181.02 and specialized in database systems. During the process I read a paper by Dr. Roger Crawfis which talked about creating 3D visualizations for datasets of flow fields. Dr. Crawfis received his BS in computer science from Purdue University and his PhD from the University of California, Davis/Livermore in 1995.

While looking for candidates to interview I looked mostly for papers which aligned with my field of interest. I found Dr. Crawfis quickly because of his interest in visualization. I am visual learner and learning about representing scientific data sets with computer graphics and 3D modeling was very interesting to me. I chose to interview a third year student majoring in CSE who specialized in software engineering. I wanted to get some insight into all of the specializations before I have to choose one for myself and talking with someone who has experience in all three seemed beneficial. Lastly I decided to speak with a graduate student that focused on database systems while in his undergraduate since I will be conduction an intership with a company that creates software for database integration and synchronization.

While talking to the upperclassman it was really interesting to hear the different opportunities he has had in the different fields in computer science. Even though he specializes in software engineering he was able to take classes that introduced artificial intelligence, game design, and security. He clarified that even though all CSE students at Ohio State are required to choose a specialization it is simple to change specialization. One thing that really stuck out to me was how intertwined many of the specializations are. It was very reassuring to hear that I didn’t have to lock myself into a very specific set of courses. He also showed me an example schedule of how to manage marching band and CSE since he is not only a CSE major but also a trumpet player in the marching band. Another thing that really stuck out to me was the emphasis he gave to time management. He helped show me that the transition between high school is very doable if taken in the right mindset. The last thing we talked about was the possibility of research and internships. He assured me that research was a very viable and achievable option but for him an internship with a software company was more beneficial. Since many CSE jobs are in retail or commercial positions he shared with me the value of getting field experience in a parallel area. Many of the people specializing in AI choose research because of the breaking edge research currently being done at Ohio State which helps to get them familiar with the types of tasks they would be completing in the work world. Since he focuses on software engineering he instead chose to get field experience.

The Graduate Student that I interviewed talked to me a lot about the academic side of engineering. He explained to me that he decided to be a TA because he was contemplating the possibility of teaching CSE instead of going into the commercial field. It was cool to get his perspective on CSE since he was pursuing his degree to hopefully teach which caused him to look at his classes much differently than the undergraduate student I talked to. While both of them worked very hard at their classes the Jacob Ferrara, the undergraduate student I interviewed focused very much on how he would be able to apply topics outside of class whereas Jacob Spiegel, the graduate student I interviewed focused much more on how he could adapt or change the materials he learned to be applicable to different age groups and experience levels that he hoped to teach. It was very eye opening to see this approach to CSE because before talking to him I had never thought about pursuing a CSE degree to then teach only to use as a gateway to the software development world. It was also cool to listen to him tell stories of how the skills he learned in the database systems specialization were applicable to other fields of interest. He explained to me that if I for instance had an interest in biology or chemistry that I could use database systems to help model and organize data. While I work with database systems weekly for my job I had never looked at them from a data acquisition point of view in the scientific field. I had considered pursuing Marine Biology before deciding on CSE so it was cool to hear from him that the fields could possible have some overlap.

While finding my scholarly articles, I looked for papers that covered either my areas of interest or areas covered in my specialization. I found my articles using Scopus. I narrowed my search by looking for recently published articles in both the computer science and engineering subject groups. From there I then selected a group of papers that seemed interesting to me and then selected ones written by Dr. Roger Crawfis because of the possibility of having him for instruction later in my undergraduate career. While fascinating the scholarly articles I read contained a large amount of content that was way over my head in terms of vocabulary and knowledge. I haven’t learned many of the basic programming skills needed to be able to practically use and understand the content of the articles although I was able to understand the general concepts and theories. While scholarly articles are very beneficial for publishing breakthroughs in the field, because I am a CSE major often times new software is instead shared through open source file sharing and other projects. Since code can be shared so easily using the internet articles containing software breakthroughs aren’t always published. Instead code is released as applications or files.

The meeting I had with Dr. Crawfis was brief but very informative. He explained to me the wide range of research opportunities available to CSE majors and offered advice on where to go if I were interested in participating. He also talked about the work he has done in advancing the 3D representation of datasets. It was cool to hear him talk about the background code that goes into the visuals that are often represented with data sets. It had never previously occurred to me the background work that went into effectively modeling real life data digitally.

While talking to the three people I interviewed I learned a lot more about how broad the field I chose to study is. It helped me realize that the CSE field is much more broad than I initially thought. It was very informative to see three completely different perspectives of the same field.

Crawfis R, et al. “Data Analytics Framework for a Game-Based Rehabilitation System”. DH 2016 – Proceedings of the 2016 Digital Health Conference. SCOPUS. Web. 24 Oct. 2016.

Crawfis R, et al. “View Point Evaluation and Streamline Filtering for Flow Visualization”. IEEE Pacific Visualization Symposium 2011, PacificVis 2011 – Proceedings. SCOPUS. Web. 24 Oct. 2016.]