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Tseng's Portfolio

In my time here at the University of St. Thomas, I have learned lots throughout my classes about Computer Science. When I became a student here, I initially was an Electrical Engineering major student. I went through with it my first year and realized that I did not like electrical things, especially circuit analysis! This made me question whether electrical engineering was right for me. After talking to lots and lots of professors, counselors, and family, I realized I really enjoyed the coding and debugging side of electrical engineering. This realization made me switch majors, and I became a Computer Science major.

As I went through the CISC classes here at the University of St. Thomas, my understanding of "Computer Science" changed and improved. Computer Scientists do not just code video games or hack things. They sit down for three hours stuck on a bug, only to realize that they misspelled a function name! You may think that was a joke, but that example actually shows that computer scientists are persistent and hard working. My understanding of computer science was further developed through a class called "Web Development" here at St. Thomas. This class not only applied the fundamentals of object oriented programming, but added on to it. This was a class that I had always had an interest in. In this class, there were many single projects and group projects. One of the early projects we worked on was creating a personal website about our interests, hobbies, job, basically a website about us. This class allowed me to not only express my creativity through developing a website, but also to introduce me to the world of HTML and CSS. It helped my improve on my personal coding skills and debugging skills. Overall, this project was a fun first project to get used to frameworks and coding in HTML and CSS. Here is the link to that project, https://github.com/Tyang05/Tyang05.github.io

The next two projects I wanted to talk about are from a class I took called "Computer Graphics". The first project out of the two was a 3D projection group project. This project had us implement 3D line drawing by projecting models onto a view-plane. We basically drew 3D shapes using lines onto the web page using HTML's canvas 2D API. Once we drew these 3D shapes onto the page, we had to be able to rotate the plane and zoom in/out of the plane. By manipulating the plane in this way, we could see our shapes from a different perspective/view. More detailed information about this project can be seen here, https://github.com/Tyang05/cg-3dprojections. For this project, we worked in groups of three. One big thing I took from working in this group project was to ask questions! We had one group partner who was very good at visualizing the shapes, the plane, and the view in their head. This made it very easy for that person to understand what our functions and code were doing. For me, I am very bad at visualizing what is going on. In order for me to do my part, I had to ask questions to get a better understanding. This allowed me to learn and pick up the visualizations quicker because a fellow student understood our own code we wrote and was able to explain to me what's going on. Not only that, but working in a group project with other students made the project more enjoyable. It gave me a small glimpse of life after college where you're working in a team to try and create an application. So, this project helped me grow as a person to be able to feel comfortable asking questions to other students. I've always been more on the quiet side, so this helped me be more outgoing as a person. It also helped me grow as a computer scientist with visualizing different concepts and seeing problems from a different angle/perspective.

The other project I worked on in graphics was playing with fragment shaders. This project was basically creating video filters to change shaders of a video. Think of Instagram photo filters. Users using this application can expect to change a video's shaders. Here is the link to that project, https://github.com/Tyang05/cg-fragshaders.

With my time here at St. Thomas and after completing these projects, it has helped me work towards the St. Thomas mission statements. One of the mission statements that St. Thomas has is "Academic Excellence". I feel like the classes that I have taken helped me achieve this mission statement. By working in groups and different types of people, I was surrounded by those who helped me create a safe place that recognizes the power of ideas. This can be seen when working in group projects by allowing my groupmates to feel comfortable sharing ideas and working towards a solution to a common problem.

Overall, it has been a great time here and I hope to bring what I have learned throughout my college career to whatever my future holds.