OftenImitated Blog

UT, BYU, BYU-I, TTU, TSU… Where should/will I go after this year at ACC?

Don’t get me wrong: I love my job (really?). But, this is by no means my career. As The Office’s Jim Halpert once said, “if this were my career, I’d have to throw myself in front of a train.” So, as I sit here, waiting for a movie to start, I feel impressed to have this inner discussion with myself, which I might end up posting on my blog.

On the one hand, I would very much like obtain my BS in computer science and the go to law school. Ever since my freshman year of high school, I have had an interest in legal and political subjects, and I would relish the opportunity to practice corporate law.

On the other hand, (relatively) recently I have become intensely interested in computer science and programming, and related fields. In high school, I found the CS assignments to be tedious and outright boring, but now that I have somewhat branched out, and I have gained more exposure to more interesting problems and languages, I have begun formulating a new plan. Indulge me for just a moment as I lay out my fantastic visions of the future:

My “plan” (if I may call it that) involves finishing out the this current year of school at community college. The next two years after that will be spent serving a mission (yes, me, serving a mission… I swear if I end up going to Utah I’m going to collapse and die). After that, I’ll either spend another year at ACC, or go straight to a university. Either way, Junior and Senior years of college will be spent at a university, finishing up my BS and co-op’ing (is that a word? Probably not). Then, after that, instead of entering the work force immediately, I want to get my masters at a research university, like Carnegie Mellon.

Now, I know what you’re going to say. Your going to say, “hey Brandon, what’s the deal, man? How are you going to get into Carnegie Mellon? And, if you do, how are you going to pay for it?” well, first of all, I’m not aiming for only that university. I’m more than open to going anywhere else, I just happen to have had that name on the top of my mind. What I really want to do is invest my time into the interesting side of computer science, and try to avoid a meaningless job where I do nothing but churn out uninteresting code all day.

Why, you may ask? Well, this is because I would like to be like Randy Pausch. No seriously, the reason I want to do this is because it is not only something that greatly interests me, but it also would serve the purpose of helping me to meet new people and travel.

Also, as a side note, I am having a bit of trouble deciding where I would like to go to college after my few semesters at community college have run their course. I would like to go to BYU, simply because I have a fleeting suspicion that I would be the most happy there. However, my Texas pride is trying to direct me to UT or Texas Tech. I guess I still have a while to decide, and I may as well apply to all three when the time comes.

Of course, none of this is likely to happen if I fail some classes, so I probably won’t be posting in this blog much for a couple weeks. I have a pretty hefty research paper to finish, and as much as I enjoy spilling my guts out for the entire internet to see, I’d much rather get A’s and such…