My Goal - A Career in the Computer Industry

My Goal - A Career in the Computer Industry

To have a goal, you must first find one to pursue. Then, you must decide on the steps necessary to reach that goal and proceed to complete those steps. Ultimately, after all your steps are finish, you will achieve your goal. The goal I pursue is that of becoming a self-employed web designer, and I have decided on, and implemented, many steps needed to reach that goal. Having started college, I have begun an important step towards my goal. However, I decided on many of the steps years before I started college.

Growing up, I strongly desired a career in the computer industry. I enjoyed working with almost anything related to the computer field, but I was not sure specifically which area of this broad field I would enjoy most. Though my interests were so extensive, I found myself strongly leaning towards computer graphics. I decided to pursue a career in web design, an area with a great demand for imaging skills, as well as a diversity and abundance of job opportunities.

After deciding on my goal, I started to research what my next steps should be. The first step was to choose a degree pertaining to web design and to find a college that offered this degree. I decided to obtain a Computer Science (CS) degree, as it covered a broad area of computer study. I researched colleges within the state of Montana, in order to avoid the costs of out-of-state tuition, and found two colleges that looked promising: Montana Tech in Butte, and Montana State University (MSU) in Bozeman.

Before deciding which to attend, I took nine credits at Carroll College in Helena and three credits at the Helena College of Technology to get a head start in my CS program. I tried to take classes that would transfer into both Montana Tech and MSU, but in the end, MSU would not accept all of my classes. This fact, combined with scholarship incentives, aided my decision to attend Montana Tech in pursuit of a CS degree.

Having started college, I have begun the next step towards achieving my goal, but not without complications. Although I remained in the CS program for much of the first semester, I switched degrees about two-thirds of the way through. I found that I would be learning mostly computer programming in the CS degree and would not learn many useful skills pertaining to my goal.