N.C. State Unviersity is in Raleigh, North Carolina and is chiefly an engineering and agriculture school, though there are many different and diverse colleges within the university.

I graduated from here in May 2020 with a B.S. in Computer Engineering as well as a B.S. in Electrical Engineering. I also picked up a minor in Mathematics along the way, as I took math classes every semester or so to break up my engineering workload and keep from burning out completely. I went here for a little under 5 years, starting in August 2015 and graduating in May 2020.

Along the way I made a lot of friends, meeting through various clubs like the Philosophy Club and the Linux User Group, and through my classes and by way of existing friends. I also created / cultivated several communities around the university myself, uniting people who otherwise likely would've never met and enjoyed that different perspective. It's amazing how siloed you can become once you're locked-in for your major after your first year, especially in engineering.

Old College Try

Before I matriculated into university in Raleigh, I lived in rural North Carolina with my parents, attending a high-school which was adjacent to no less than 3 different farms in an equally rural part of the county. I didn't really do much because classes were so easy I didn't really need to try. I started learning C and x86 outside of school around the age of 15, and about one semester before I left my high-school behind I developed a healthy reading habit, inhaling War and Peace along with all the old, dusty books I could get my hands on. It was around this time that I also started keeping a diary because that seemed like the only way to vent any emotion for a boy who feels kinda-out-of-place in the middle of nowhere.

I was always very comfortable living on my own. From my experiences camping with the Boy Scouts (which I was in until I acheived my Eagle and turned 18) I had become accustomed to spending days and nights away from "home" in some strange wilderness so the transition into the college / dorm life was very smooth. Actually I was very glad to be away from "home" because there were new people all around me and brand new things to do and explore. Raleigh is also a beautiful city full of interesting people and I'd never lived somewhere so pleasant before so I was very comfortable during this oft-tumultuous time.

My first-year classes were extremely easy and I got the hang of the class-homework-study-test cycle in just a month or two. Eventually, though, I got pretty complacent because this stuff was so easy and I'd learned a lot of this in my spare time. From my sophomore year on things were a little harder ( ・ω・) but I enjoyed many of these courses and took a lot from them, especially my ASIC / FPGA classes, because those were a perfect blend (for me) of hardware and software engineering. Power engineering was of interest to me as well (I worked for a bit as a substation design consultant during my off-season from university) but I ultimately forfeit that opportunity to do what I do now in a more fast-paced field.

While attending university I also passed the FE (fundamentals of engineering) exam, meaning I qualify to take the PE (Professional Engineer) exam should I ever want to become a certified honest-to-God Professional Engineer. Being a PE means a lot in other fields (notably, for me, if I decided to go back and work as an electrical engineer) but having a PE in my current field would be rather meaningless. Still, it is nice to have that option, I've learned that keeping doors open and cultivating your opportunities is one of the keys to finding room to do the things you love.

Study Abroad in Tōkyō, Japan

In the Spring of 2018 I made one of the best decisions ever I've ever made to study at Sophia University in Tōkyō, Japan. This was really a life-changing experience and it instilled within me the desire to do things and see things much larger than myself. Just getting over there was one of my goals from the start of my college career, and closing in and making good on that promise to myself was extremely formative to my goal-setting habits today. In fact, I'd been studying Japanese by myself since my Freshman year, and this cemented the idea that I am both capable of learning independently (and at a decent pace) and of bringing my hopes and dreams into my reality.

While abroad I had the opportunity to travel around Japan, particularly during Golden Week. Even while I was not travelling, though, there was plenty to do in just Tōkyo, it is an absolutely massive city full of different and unique little towns. Just simply living, breathing, eating and drinking in this foreign lifestyle every single day for a semester was Nirvana and I would never trade this experience for another.