Reading 00a: Introduction

Hello, my name is Joey Spencer. I am a senior Computer Science major at the University of Notre Dame. I am originally from Mansfield, Massachusetts, which is a town about 30 miles south of Boston. I come from a family of 5 where I am the middle child. I have an older sister named Pam who graduated college last year and a younger sister named Lindsey who will be beginning college this year. In my free time, I like listening to music and watching TV. I am a big fan of the New England Patriots and the Boston Bruins, so I also like to watch sports.

When I entered college, I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to major in. Deciding what to major in always seemed like a big decision to make for me as a then-18 year old, so I didn’t want to rush the decision. As such, I was a Biology major in my first semester freshman year, but I wasn’t really set on that. As the semester went on and I began to realize that Biology wasn’t really for me, I started to realize that I would most likely want to major in something in the College of Engineering. I switched into the College of Engineering for my second semester, and it was in the Introduction to Engineering course where I discovered my interest in coding. I had never coded before that class, so my first exposure to coding was learning Matlab. I ended up liking coding so much, that I eventually decided to become a Computer Science major. Looking back on it, I am very happy with my decision as I have enjoyed my experience with the Notre Dame Computer Science curriculum so far. Some of my favorite courses that I have taken within the Computer Science Department are Software Engineering and Cryptography. While it hasn’t always been easy, I am all in all happy that I am studying Computer Science.

I am really looking forward to this course and hope to get a lot out of it. This course seems as if it will be unlike any other Computer Science class I have taken so far as it does not involve any coding. Despite this, I do think and hope that I will learn a lot. There are a lot of big issues that are facing society, and many of them relate to technology. These issues include things such as government surveillance, automation, and artificial intelligence. As a result of these issues facing society, it is very likely that we will all be grappling with these issues when we graduate and begin our careers in software. I hope that with the course we can all become more informed about these issues so that we will be able to make intelligent and thoughtful decisions about them. If everyone who deals with these big issues is fully informed and conscientious, then hopefully decisions will be made that will benefit society, not harm it. Another thing that I am looking forward to as it relates to this course is hearing the viewpoints of others. People have very diverse backgrounds, and will likely have views that I may not necessarily agree with or just haven’t heard before. I think it will be good to be able to hear varying viewpoints, as it will hopefully allow me to better understand the issues we will be discussing.