Bulleted Items

5 bulleted items on qualities as a student

  • OPEN MINDED (walked into csp last year with very narrow view of cs, saw live reviews in a grade oriented perspective only, finally started to view CSP and CSA differently, as oppurtunity to demonstrate my progress and learn)
  • CREATIVE (create very detailed and accurate wireframes using FIGMA (aesthetic and visually appealing as well as user friendly), took creative liberty and created a logo with different themed version and a slogan for the PBL website (Study website -> STUD the study owl) )
  • HIGH ACHIEVER (always looking for more opportunities to complete more work than just the required hacks. For example, in the innovation using object hacks I worked on an extra code exploration where I explored mutators, constructors, and accessors. Another example is when we were learning boolean and if expressions I went one step further and explored truth tables and logic gates. )
  • COLLABORATIVE (worked very well in teams all of last year in CSP and this tri in CSA)
  • CURIOUS (wanted to explore other programming languages and other applications of computer science -> applied for a tech research internship involving MatLab programming language, dual enrolled at a foothill communtiy college and took a course on Object Oriented Programming in Java over the summer )

5 bulleted items on technical accomplishments

  • manage team as scrum master (create and delegate tasks, create and manage scrumboard, organize issues)
  • deployment of individual project on AWS EC2 instance
  • PBL project planning - intricate FIGMA wireframes, flowchart of linking website pages
  • javascript, java, and python backend work (logic word game feature (wordle), sticky note note-taker with local storage implemented (can edit, add, delete notes))
  • html, css, scss front end work (APIs, cat facts api, city facts api)(made homepages, navbar, and other pages more visually appleaing and following a cohesive theme)(light mode and dark mode with scss)
  • took oppurtunity to learn and work with MatLab programming language in UCSD REHS internship

Original Letter of Rec Prep:

When I first contacted you about writing a letter of rec for me for a summer internship you asked for 3 of my best moments from computer science principles. Here is exactly what I wrote before.

  • One very memorable moment for me was the end of trimester 1 of AP CSP. For the FINAL CSP Video I was asked along with a couple other students to help grade other people’s videos because the video I had made was very good and successfully connected all the college board topics to my work from the TRI. This moment in CSP is pretty important to me because prior to this happening I was intimidated by all of the computer science principles concepts which lead me to be very quiet in class and not participate as much during team live reviews. But I felt like my accomplishments had been recognized at this moment which lead me to be more confident in my programming skills during trimester 2. The increase and confidence also encouraged me to speak up more during discussions.

  • Another memorable moment for me was the mid term vocabulary live review. Samaya was my partner and we got live reviewed together. I felt that this live review was different from all the previous ones. A really good conversation took place. It went beyond just what the vocab words meant and we discussed how the terms/concepts related to our code. I started seeing live reviews as an opportunity to further my knowledge and expand on what I had already learned instead of just a review to get a grade.

  • A third memorable moment for me was when I got my cat facts API to work near the start of the second trimester. I had struggled for a bit and could not get my API to work. So I came in during tutorial for the first time to ask you for help. Previously I had been hesitant to reach out for help because I wasn’t confident in my programming skills at all. But after we worked together and I finally got my API to run correctly it was really rewarding for me.

Additions to the Original Letter:

Here is some progress I made in or through your classes following the original letter of rec.

  • I felt confident enough to apply to an REHS internship at the SDSC of UCSD because I took your AP CSP class. I applied for a project about the Visualization of Ultradian Rhythms in Sleep EEG and MEG. This internship required me to be familiar with the Python language and just computer science in general because I would be working with a language that I’ve never encountered called MatLab. During my interview for the position, I showed my research mentor snippets of python and javascript code that I wrote in your class. I also showed him the deployed PBL websites we spent the majority of the year designing and creating to demonstrate that I was familiar with programming. During the course of the internship, I worked with python and Matlab to develop different algorithms to transform raw EEG and MEG sleep data from 4 human subjects into visualizations like 2D Topographic Brain Maps and 3D Spatiotemporal Isosurfaces. I got to experience a real application of coding because of the foundations I built in computer science in your class.

  • In the first few weeks of AP CSA, which will be the start of the second year I’m spending as your student, I can already feel the differences compared to the start of last year in AP CSP. During the very beginning of last school year, I struggled to understand everything; it felt like the class was taking off way too fast. Admittedly a lot of my weekly work in the live reviews were scuffed together last minute and included content that I still did not understand at the moment. I remember hoping during the team live reviews that you would not call on me to explain anything because I didn’t understand all the concepts. Over the past year, I feel that I’ve grown a lot as a programmer. Now, I understand everything that I am doing when I work on the weekly hacks, and if I am stuck it is quickly resolved. I’ve walked into all of the team live reviews so far this year feeling prepared. I find it funny compared to last year how I now sometimes feel like there is not enough time during live reviews to show you everythign I worked on during the week.