My name is Conor O’Riordan, and I am a graduate student at SUNY New Paltz for computer science. When I was an undergraduate here at New Paltz, I studied mathematics and history along with a minor in German. In several of my math courses, we used Python to model topics such as normalization in linear algebra or random walks in probability and statistics; however, this was my only prior exposure to computer science.
Since starting the program, I have created a MySQL database modeling the Julio-Claudian family tree from antiquity and designed a website for my senior history seminar paper. I have taken Programming and Data Structures, Computer Systems, and Database Design; I am currently enrolled in Introduction to Cyber Security, Web Development, and Cloud Systems this semester.
I hope that this class, and this masters’ program as a whole, will wed my love for math and history under one profession. I have enjoyed building simple websites in the past, and I enjoy designing the layout and coordinating the aesthetics due to my interest in the arts. I am looking forward to building apps, for one of my ideal career paths is creating interactive apps and websites for heritage and archeological sites. The pedagogical opportunities of such specialized apps are often underappreciated; I often downloaded German tourist apps to research German monuments for my history papers. If we have time this semester, I look forward to accessing database from a website, specifically in the pursuit of web development for educational purposes or archival research.