There’s a lot that I've told myself that I want to accomplish. It includes getting about five degrees, finding somewhere to work that’s perfect for me, and fixing pretty much all of the world’s problems. When I frame my goals like this though, they seem stressful and pretty much impossible.

When I was in first grade waiting for my turn on the swings, two second graders took the opportunity to tell me how much smarter they were than me. They knew what happened in the Revolutionary War. Did I? Of course not, because first graders are stupid, they told me.

There’s a company that I’ve really, really wanted to work at for the past year now, and yesterday they called me and told me that they weren’t going to hire me for the summer. This is after they invited me to come tour their company last spring, which caused me to fall behind significantly in my schoolwork. This is after last year they kept telling me “maybe” they would hire me until it became summer and the interns they did hire had already started. This is after countless friends of computer science events, emails sent back and forth, and hours spent studying data structures.

When I started college as a computer science major I wasn’t really committed to the idea of sticking with it. I’d taken one class in high school, which was pretty fun, but the idea of doing it for the rest of my life was still something I wasn’t entirely sure of. To me, college was the place where you were supposed to figure out what you wanted to major in, and I pretty much expected to change my mind at least once. I even chose UT because it was such a huge school, so there were a lot of options to switch out to.

In high school I remember thinking that my life would be a lot easier if I just didn’t have to sleep. I hardly did as it was, and really felt that when I did make the time for it, or to do anything just for fun I was wasting my time and should have been doing something “important” instead.

I got to college and things weren’t very different. While I now realize that my expectation to be a completely different person didn’t make much sense, at the time I was surprised at how little my life had changed.

I have to really force myself to be extroverted. I’ve gotten pretty good at it, thankfully, but there are still certainly times when I know I’m being awkward and I really have no idea how to make it stop.

I am a constant mind-changer. When I originally pitched my idea for the blog this week, I said I’d be writing about my decision to get the BSA degree instead of the BS. Now I’m not so sure.

It’s May 1, which means that for the rest of the year there will be far fewer high school students walking through Gregory asking if they can take underwater rock climbing classes or visiting lectures to be the only ones without iClickers.

Senior year was one of the most fun times of my life, not only because of all of the random scootering to school with my friends, or road trips that my mom and I just had to take before it was too late, but because the future could be anything I wanted it to be.

It’s incredible what you can make with just Xcode and an idea (sorry Android people, I have my loyalties). I recently sat down with Dr. Paul Toprac to talk about the new Mobile Computing Certificate coming to UT and I’m so excited to see the projects that will result from it. Check out the news article that came from my interview!

Like most of the freshmen in their first few weeks of classes at UT, I decided that going to the career fair to scramble to get an internship was a good idea. Obviously, the earlier I could start panicking about the future, the better.

I didn’t get hired by Google or Facebook right then and there, but whatever. There was still time for the summer to work itself out. In March, I went to San Diego for a conference that I was invited to by one of the recruiters I’d met this year called Qualcomm Women’s Collegiate Conference.