Jake Pascute

About Me

I'm a computer science student with a passion for learning new things. Growing up I obsessively absorbed as much knowledge as possible about anything I found interesting, and that hasn't really changed as i've become an adult. I'm currently on track to graduate with a B.S. in computer science and a math minor as I enter my senior year.

My parents were video gamers, so I grew up around computers and quickly fell in love. When I discovered programming something clicked in my mind and it became an obssession. Software gave me an outlet for creativity, and also a logical framework to view the world from. I remember in one of my initial college math classes writing psuedocode to be able to understand what was going on, it taught me to think critically and helped transfer what I knew into a domain I had less comfort with.

I had a few opportunities to checkout "coding" during my traditional schooling, by that point I was already beyond any topics that could have been covered in a freshman highschool introductory class, and found it incredibly boring. Admittedly I had a lot of trouble during highschool in general, it never took effort from me and mostly felt like a waste of time, so I stopped caring and my grades slipped into disrepair. That's a feeling i've have to overcome and resolve during my college education, finding ways to self motivate and recapture the original fascination I had, even when the coursework was not hard or interesting to me.

Due to my issues in highschool, I ended up dropping out as a 16 year old. I had tried online school and realized I couldn't keep myself accountable, and going in person felt like I was being waterboarded by the CIA constantly. Later that year I took a highschool equivalency test to be able to say I graduated and hopefully not mess up my future too badly. I used my "failures" during highschool to ensure I never put myself in a position where I could neglect my college study.

Going into college I had nearly 0 experience with OOP or any of the "normal" programming stuff, I had mostly done automation tasks in python or other scripting languages, I knew what a function was for code reuse and that's about it. Rewiring my brain for java and compiled languages was a fun learning experience, but it never felt "right" to me. A lot of my data structures course was trying to implement linked-list data structures as arrays. Don't ask how much memory my Trie ended up using.

One of my favorite courses so far has been our intro to C and Unix. Our professor was very passionate and drilled the basics of C and memory management into us until it was impossible to forget. I thrived in this course, and the footgun aspects of the C language intrigued me, managing my own heap memory was a breath of fresh air compared to the java garbage collector. I will never forget DRY or "one malloc one free", I think professor Chen repeated those phrases every single lecture.

I get asked somewhat frequently what I want to do after college, or if I have any plans. I don't have a good answer for that, I still have a passion for what I am studying, but some days I wish I had kept it as a hobby rather than my future. Of course its impossible to predict where I will end up, but I hope to find a job thats fulfilling and challenging, somewhere I can learn new things and push my knowledge further in a subdomain I am interested in. I want to be given a puzzle and told to figure it out to the best of my ability. I don't think I could come into an office and do the same thing day after day.