To aid me and help push me further throughout my journey through college, I applied to, and was accepted into, the Center of Excellence in Remote Sensing Education and Research (CERSER) program, overseen by Dr. Linda B. Hayden. The CERSER program is a research program that also pushes its members to further their experience by gaining internships, and also furthering their education by encouraging them to enter their graduate studies. With the aid of this program I will pursue my degrees, learn all the tools, and gain the experience needed to obtain a career in the computer science field.

The summer of 2017 I attended Science Gateways’ Community Institute four week coding internship, where my coding skills were enhanced and I learned how to configure computers. Here the skills navigating a terminal and learning all of it commands were also taught to me There were also a few coding languages taught to me, including R and Python.  

Also in the summer or 2017 I attended Practice and Experience in Advanced Research Computing ‘17. “Sustainability, Success, and Impact” was the theme of the conference. Sustainability of infrastructure environment, measuring and ensuring success for organizations that provide and use advanced research computing, and impact of the technologies on the workforce and on science and scholarship, were all key issues that supported this theme. This was a great experience because it showed me the vast coding world and taught me how to apply what I’ve learned. I was also able to present my research at this conference.

The spring semester of 2017 was when CERSER started conducting research projects. Each student in the program was assigned a mentor, my mentor was Edward Swindell. Our research dealt with unmanned aerial systems

I plan to continue my education at ECSU and graduate with my bachelor’s degree in computer science and mathematics and move forward to receive my master’s degree in both fields. Along the way I plan on receiving internship opportunities to excel my skills in my desired fields.