Foster School of Business Acceptance

On October 25, 2019, I was accepted into the Foster School of Business with a concentration in Information Systems. The artifact is my acceptance letter along with how my application compared to the other applicants that were accepted. I will graduate with a Bachelors of Arts in Business Administration and a Bachelors of Science in Computer Science as well as College Honors from the University of Washington Honors Program. Being able to apply to Foster required several meetings with my departmental adviser in Computer Science to work on completing a graduation plan and petition to be submitted to Foster. Currently, I have a 5 year graduation plan to allow me to take less credits my last two years so I can focus on finding internships and experiential learning activities outside of the classroom related to my majors. I am only the second person in the Allen School to complete a double degree with Business Administration, which is incredibly exciting to know that I am taking a path that not many people have taken before.

The concentration in Information Systems allows me to focus on business analytics and data science, which fits really well with Computer Science. The combination of both degrees greatly widens the possibilities and career paths I can take in the future. It will allow me to take my Computer Science degree outside of the traditional technology industry or enter into project management, which requires both an understanding of business management and a deep technical background. I am particularly interested in understanding the applications of technology in running modern businesses, specifically how businesses use customer data to drive management decisions. Understanding these interactions requires a knowledge of coding and data science that Computer Science provides while Business Administration provides the ability to apply this knowledge to business management decisions. I believe that the combination of majors will give me the ability to be successful in obtaining a management role in a male dominated technology industry and make a positive impact on the world through technology and business.

Web Development Certificate

At the end of Spring quarter, I enrolled in the HTML, CSS and Javascript for Web Development course from Johns Hopkins University through Coursera. It was a five week course with five different homework assignments that corresponded with several hours of recorded lectures. The program took us through creating basic web pages with HTML, styling the page with CSS and developing interactive components with Javascript. My favorite assignment from the course was creating a three column page for a simple restaurant menu and styling the fonts, colors and designs for the page. We also got to walk through the development of the website for Davy Chu's China Bistro, which was a fully functioning, responsive and dynamic website being used by a real restaurant.

I earned my certificate in July 2020 for Web Development and am excited to start some additional projects with these skills. This certificate gave me the skills to begin developing my own personal portfolio website to showcase my resume and projects. This upcoming Fall I will be going through my first recruiting season for computer science internships, I am excited I got the opportunity to continue to expand my coding skills.

Highlight: HONORS 241 - Introduction to Photography

This Honors course was focused on learning about basic photography techniques and conceptual theories in the field of photography. We spent class periods examining the work of various artists, practicing with our cameras on campus, practicing different demos with lighting and having reading discussions related to the photography assignments we would be shooting. There was also a photography journal component to the course. Every week, we chose the same location to take photos at and spend a little time journaling about whatever came to mind. I picked Magnuson Park along Lake Washington and had managed to explore the entire park by the end of the quarter. The course also included completing two photography projects, one of which was in the style of typology and the other that centered around the idea of photography as constructed images. Unfortunately, we did not get to complete a third project centered around our photos and themes from our journals as we transitioned to online classes for the remainder for Winter quarter. This artifact is the first photography project from the course, focused on typology.

A number of things occur when you line up a set of images with very closely related subjects. They begin to suggest a type and, more deeply, they reveal something about how we make sense of the world. For your first project, select a type of object. This can be something simple that you come across in your everyday life or a more abstract object/concept. It doesn’t need to be anything inherently special, but through the process of photographing it you should develop a position towards it. Most importantly, be critical of your relationship to this object. Do you have a personal connection to it? Is it formally intriguing? Is it something you found or made?

I really wanted this project to be about a set of objects that appeared to be something ordinary but had a deeper meaning behind them. The collection of shot glasses has some of my favorite memories spanning all the way from my childhood to my first trip to Canada in January 2020. We keep them on display in a cabinet, which is why I photographed them in more of a museum sense with a plain background. I also really wanted to keep the focus on the design of each glass rather than where the element lives in its habitat. Overall, I think that the critique went well and that for the most part the message from the photographs came through while sparking a lot of questions and interest as to why I had chosen them to be my subject. I found it really interesting that one person found the background to be sterile while another found the lighting to evoke a sense of happiness and light throughout the photos.

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