My father is quite surprised that I ended up continuing my education with a major of Electrical Engineering at Purdue University. I was a kid who escaped from his first day of school. From my childhood, I had this curiosity to know how things work. To fulfill my curiosity I broke all of my electronic toys into pieces. My curiosity reached in such a peak that my mother had to lock them up into a locker. But, that couldn’t stop me from destroying our brand new V.C.R. My father used to call me, “Good for nothing”. But, while I was in 9th grade, in our school science fair, I proved myself as a future electrical engineer by building a model circuit for the traffic system of our city. After getting the 1st prize, I got this valuable advice from my father: “Do whatever interests you, and don’t let the work challenge you, make sure you are challenging that work.”

I have always preferred the courses which are challenging, and the projects which are related to real life problems. I am exuberant that Purdue University gave me the opportunity to fulfill my interests. Some of the technical courses that interested me were: Introduction to Engineering Tools, C Programming, Circuit Analysis I, and Electronic Measure Techniques. I was assigned several projects in these courses and luckily most of these projects were based on real life problems. Recently I worked with op-amps and oscilloscopes, which gave me a basic idea of circuit analysis and circuit layout I also did enjoyed most of the projects on C programming because they were related to real life. One of the projects that interested me most was building a shipping program.

This program was intended to be a tool that will be used by a shipping company to create a bill for customer. There would be a text file having the specifications of the shipping materials, and my program would go through the list and specify how much to charge for each item on the list. Then the program would work that amount in the form of an invoice out to another text file.

I found this particular project interesting because it exposed me to business related work. It was a large project, So I was mentally preparing myself to sit next to a computer for a long time. I divided the whole project into several small sections and categorized it. When I understood the project clearly, I used my brainstorming skill on it, and sketched an algorithm. I verified my algorithm with my teaching assistant and professor before jumping into coding. This way I received additional feedback on my project, and felt more comfortable that I was on the right track. I think it is an excellent benefit to communicate with a professor and a teaching assistant. At first, I was intimidated to ask questions of the form “how do I do it”, because I did not know how to ask the question correctly. But as I kept working on my algorithm and discussed with my teaching assistant, I became more comfortable with asking questions and those “how” questions soon turned into “what if I do this and that” or “is it an optimized way to accomplish this” types of questions. This way, it became easier for the TA to answer my questions easily and I was learning my project intuitively.