College Experience

I went to UTD and here experience. Put what went wrong. Warning, it is the honest truth.

So it started in high school where my school would send a few teams to compete at their computer science competitions. Also during the summer, I was at an NSA gen cyber event and a few other events there. Looking back in hindsight it covered up a lot of the areas that were downside.

The school had a good computer science program and competent computer science students which at the time was rare for me and close to home. I set my goal as that school, but since I was paying for college I started out at Collin.

Collin for me at first was a get in, get out sort of mentality. I didn't do many events, wasn't a part of much. I went there for school and for my first year it was like a 13th grade or just the next logical step after high school. Well I mean it was basically a continuation as I had a dual credit class and really didn't spend much time at my high school. Anyways the second semester was much different. I was outside of my comfort zone. I saw more on campus and was more involved in school and trying to get things done and this is where the issues started to form.

We all know when we get closer to graduation a few things go wrong like you missed that one class you have to take as requirement or have to finish up with those classes you were pushing off. Well at this point I had everything in order but I decided to do something that ended up kicking me in the butt. I was on the edge of getting a 3.25 GPA. I decided to take CS 1 as I had the same teacher for CS 2 and got an easy A in the class why would this be any different. It would have been easy as I got good grades on everything except for a major project that was split into 3 parts. I messages the teacher and didn't hear back from him so tried my best at the program and first one I got a bad grade and second and third one I got worse than that because it was building on top of each other. I was ok with getting a bad grade as long as I got an A in the class. Final grade comes in and I get a B. I wouldn't have fought it, but it was the difference in $1,500 when I was transferring. And to be honest I was pissed because I had a solid A in the class until 2 days before grades were finalized. I tried to get a hold of the dean, but they wouldn't answer and eventually the Dean got switched to someone else who answered my email. We arranged a meeting and sat down, to have to admin the grade was fair because I had nothing to fight for me as I was just contacting and gave no effort since he wasn't responding. This did have an upside of I was hired by the dean to be a Tutor for the college instead. That is under the job experience though.

Now we are at junior year and first year at UTD. It was not that exciting and kind of not much to do, I didn't really find a club that I fit in with so it was basically school, home, repeat. My graduation was coming near the end of my college career, covid hit and it was one of the best things possible. School remotely was way easier as I could do other things while in the lecture and without people there it was very simple to focus. I was doing great in all my classes and all of them went by easily. The easiest one by far was the computer science project class. I finish the whole project in 1 week and constantly was going back and making small tweaks. The problem I had was we got a grade and experience in exchange for our in the real-world work experience. We easily could have done $15 an hour for a whole semester part time job worth of work and didn't get even a penny. In addition, due to the company only giving 1 project, I saved myself the trouble and eliminated myself off the bat in the interview with them.

The Senior year classes were the classes that left the big impression. This could be out of order but still gets the point across. The security class was downright wrong. He gave us broken code to start the semester and then once we got that working he gave another assignment that could be done with the code from the first assignment, but we were not told we were supposed to create our own so the highest grade of that assignment was 70% and I only got that because I asked him how it was possible and he said forget about the other code. What made me truly mad at him was not the amount of issues in assignment or the class time being spent on debugging more than teaching. One of the tests was based off of his own written text that was inaccurate. It was networking base and he was talking about 3G technology. Let that sink in that in 2020 we are talking about 3G tech. Yeah and I argued that it was wrong and my source was cisco.com, he said because it was .com website it wasn't trustworthy. That is when I lost all respect for him as a teacher. My networking class the exact opposite and passed with an A. I had a problem with 2 of the questions on a test and he said it was preparing for the CCNA which I already took, and he noted down the advice that I gave on feedback of what would help his teaching. If this were a videogame, Object Oriented Programming was the final boss, and nothing could prepare me for the situation about to come.

Object oriented programming was a fairly easy class, and the teacher's lectures didn't really provide much for me I just read the slides and skipped them entirely. It worked as I got good grades on the assignments and thought everything was fine. The week before graduation, I get an email saying I was accused of plagiarism. I was at first confused as I was doing fine in the class and really didn't talk to anyone else in that class since it was remote. I asked of document and he told me it was one that I did while I was in Colorado. His only reason is, I didn't do it like what he said in lectures. My response was I did it based information at DefCon. I was willing to turn in all evidence to prove I didn't message anyone else and it was my work. To sum it all up the end result of the conversation with teacher and academic affairs. I went to Colorado to meet up with a group of classmates to talk in person about 1 assignment worth less than 5% of final grade during the middle of the semester and no digital proof was left. I signed the document because it wasn't worth the battle and ended up dropping my grade a letter giving me a 2.99 GPA which for software developer might as well be a 2.0 as the bare minimum for a lot of places is 3.0. After all this I got spiteful that my security professor was saying his class was preparing for the real world, I went and got a security+ certification leading to the point, you can almost fail a class and end up still being good in the industry.