Happy National Engineering Week, or better known around Viterbi as EWeek! This is one of the best weeks of the year with tons of activities throughout the week to celebrate the occasion. There was a carnival, talent show, quiz bowl, and tonight is Viterbi Ball! It truly is a great week here at Viterbi.
As we celebrate engineering, I thought I would share about the coolest engineering project I have done here at USC: creating my own social network. In my Computer Science class last semester, we made a social network completely from scratch in C++. It was so cool to be able to create a program that searches through users, makes friend suggestions, adds friends, deletes friends, and overall functions like a real social network. It was so exciting to implement everything we learned throughout the semester into this final end of the semester assignment. The moment it all compiled and worked, as I wanted it to, I was so happy and felt truly like an engineer. It was so cool to know that I had created a smaller scale version of what the founders of Facebook made.
After that assignment, I began to notice how all the other projects I am doing in my classes have complete real-life applications. This semester, I am taking an Introduction into Operations Research class where we solve allocation and transportation problems using ampl and many other methods. Additionally, in my computer science class this semester we are learning about data structures, and our end of the year project will be to make an entire search engine, like Google, in C++. Lastly, in my Design for User Experience class this semester, my group is taking an idea we had for an app and designing the best possible user interface for it after following the same process many people use in the real world.
Overall, I have had the opportunity to participate in some very cool class projects. Many of which continue to make me excited about engineering and where it is headed!
Happy E–Week!
