Background

I come from a small town called Simpsonville, South Carolina. I graduated from Hillcrest High School in May with a GPA of 4.7 and ranked in the top fifteen percent of my class. I first learned of WCU last November when a friend introduced me to the school. I took a tour and became infatuated with the environment that this school prides itself in. My current experience at WCU is exactly what I expected. All the buildings are close to my dorm in Balsam, and the learning experiences are not intimidating. I have enjoyed learning about many new topics in my classes, no matter how time-consuming they are. I have made many new friends since I started coming here, which is something that I normally struggle with. I am a noticeably quiet and reserved person, so it was nice to enter WCU and get to know so many different people. I am currently a Computer Information Systems major. My main goal is to secure a job that involves coding, networking, or graphic design after I graduate. Two of my greatest mentors helped me to realize that I have a passion for all three of those subjects, so I want to honor them by pursuing these career paths in whatever way I can.

Career Apirations

Ideally, I would like to become a web developer. As I mentioned, two of my greatest mentors drove me to pursue this field of work. Becoming an active part of their web design classes almost two years ago inspired me to pursue coding and graphic design in my free time. I put many hours into teaching myself advanced HTML and CSS so that I could one day put it to use. Here at Western, I plan to utilize skills from the CIS courses so I can produce websites like the ones seen on Runway Financial and ToyFight. In recent years, however, a once overlooked entity now threatens the long-term sustainability of my job: Artificial Intelligence. AI grows in strength with each passing day. Some models have access to millions of sources from the internet that can make human efforts seem obsolete. This pool of sources also includes code that has been uploaded to various websites such as GitHub or Stack Overflow. AI is particularly intimidating to both developers and artists because it can replicate hours of work in mere seconds. Though, that very trait is what makes AI such a valuable tool. Now that I have a slightly better understanding of how AI works, I plan to utilize it as much as possible. I would no longer have to waste countless hours building a website's general infrastructure. I could have fully developed functions for my websites based on my designs in seconds. The future is not stopping AI from taking jobs; it is instead utilizing AI to enhance jobs. Adapting to AI is one thing, but allocating its efforts and advancements will only push me further in my career.