Personal Statement

My values as an Honors student.

I started my computer science degree already having a lot of knowledge from things I had taught myself over nearly a decade prior. Despite this, I wanted to learn more in university about lower-level concepts and being a university student had other benefits as well by allowing me to make connections that will benefit me for the rest of my career and has given me real world experience already, something I wouldn’t have had otherwise.

At IU Indianapolis my current honors contracts are in my Computer Structures class and Dynamic Data Applications. In my computer structures class two friends and I are doing an honors group project, something relatively unheard of in the Honors College, where we are creating a full integrated development environment for SIC/XE assembly. For this project I am working on a tokenizer for SIC/XE assembly, a formatter, debugger interface, disassembler, and parts of the user interface. This goes beyond the standard class project of only building an assembler and has greatly enhanced my understanding of the course material and the low-level details of computer architectures like registers and how memory is accessed. In my Dynamic Data Applications class, I’m doing an honors contract to build a real-time online multiplayer tic-tac-toe and four in a row game using React Native and Expo along with a custom backend server, which I plan to integrate with another personal project: a similar game I’m making for the Panic Playdate. While not part of this honors contract, I intend for the React Native application and Playdate game to both communicate in the same way and to the same backend service, allowing cross-play between people on different platforms. For future honors contracts, I plan to do them in mostly Media Arts & Science classes focused on web development, as I have a lot of passion for web development and find it very fun. Another plan I have for honors credits is to use my internship at Division of Undergraduate Education for HON-H 398 for honors credit.

At IU Indianapolis I am a web development intern for the Division of Undergraduate Education Communications office. At DUE I get to apply what I’ve learned to managing dozens of websites at IU Indianapolis as well as developing custom applications to help students with things like finding majors. Through this internship I’ve made new connections and have learned more about engaged learning as I’ve had to update the Institute for Engaged Learning and Honors College websites. This internship has also given me new projects to explore. With the free time I do have at work I’ve explored projects to make my job more efficient by writing custom applications to automate the slowest tasks I do and make updating websites easier.

As part of this I am also responsible for ensuring the websites maintained by Division of Undergraduate Education meet federally mandated accessibility standards so that they’re usable by a diverse audience, following the Honors College value of Equity and Inclusion. For this, I add alternative text to images, follow accessibility standards, and review issues flagged by Siteimprove, an enterprise tool for automatically analyzing websites used by Indiana University.