Week 4 Learning Journal

 Here we are at the end of week 4. The Ethics essay topic has been submitted and approved. Its framework and sources have been assembled, ready for the full write next week. My main goal for the next academic week is to get said essay written by Saturday. Speaking of goals, the prompt for this weeks focuses on setting long-term goals for both my education and career path. I'll admit, setting long-term goals isn't the easiest thing in the world for me. I always try to keep myself within the realms of possibility and end up either over doing so, or otherwise panicking myself over potential risks. To the result of either having a goal that is simply too vague or underwhelming. Nevertheless, I will at least try to do so here. 

For the educational goal, I would just say something along the lines of 'Get through to the end of the program and get my Bachelor's degree', but that is too boring. To tell the truth, I would be more interested in learning the many and varying tricks that go into the creation of some of the best titles in gaming and their mechanics. Ever since I had discovered the magic of modding computer games when I was playing Minecraft many years ago, I had been fascinated with how digital worlds worked under the hood, and wondered how to make them do something new. And, frankly, that hasn't changed. Especially now that I'm playing Rimworld, and Factorio, two games that both bear their own flourishing mod-making communities. I'd always wanted to learn how to make my own, and a part of me being here in this program at CSUMB is to make that happen.

My Career goal follows this story further. Going from make mods for games to making the games themselves. Of course shooting even further ahead, I can't say I've anything very specific in mind. Beyond becoming a computer game developer in some respect. Maybe I can transition into game making from mod making, I don't know yet. As I say, I have difficulty forming plans this far out. That said, I would absolutely appreciate being apart of making something that would be enjoyable for others to play, even if it doesn't become a smash hit in the industry in similar fashion to how Call of Duty, Grand Theft Auto, or Minecraft did. 

In any case, somewhere along the journey to potentially realizing these goals in some form or another, is something called the "ETS Computer Science test". From what I gather, it is an exam put together by a coalition of educators across the computer science field to asses the readiness of students and/or efficacy of the curriculums they study. Coupled with its own pseudo-code language, the test covers everything from programming and discrete structures, to broader systems' architecture and algorithms. Looking over the sample questions provided, I can already see how many new terms, names, and symbols I'm going to have to learn on the road leading up to said exam. I certainly hope we're allowed some degree of note card or something as some of the symbology here is definitely going to lose me. If I am to hazard a guess as to what percentile I could see myself scoring in right now, then I'm willing to play the cautious optimist and shoot for mid-to-high B territory, 85-89%. As much as I wish I could see myself shooting for higher, I'm not willing to ignore the very real likelihood that I may experience a blank while taking the exam or encounter a question or topic that was either poorly touched on or not gone over at all. On top of that, I've had previous experiences where I think I'm going to score really high on an exam, only to be disappointed when discovering I hadn't done much better than average. There have, yes, been cases where I've actually had D's and below, too. So, I feel justified in playing it safe here. After a certain point, one learns that 'surprise' is more preferable to 'disappointment'.