Jay Arnold

CprE 494 Cumulative Reflection

My time at Iowa State can be described as nothing other than exceptional. I

came into college thinking I was very smart. I was quickly humbled by the class CprE

185. I had never coded in my life. The class teaches the basics of coding, but it isn’t a

walk in the park. The labs made me think in many different ways to solve the problems.

The final lab was to make a game using a PS4 controller as the input. It was one of the

hardest things I’ve done, and I knew my adventure at Iowa State was going to be a

challenge.

A class that challenged my problem solving skills and using external resources

was ComS 309. It is a project class building an android application. I had never done

any backend programming, so I didn’t know what to do most of the time. I had to look at

a lot of examples online, read code documentation, and other resources to get a grasp

of what to do. At that point, I then had to do trial and error to see if things worked.

Something in our database wasn’t working, so I spent many hours online trying to

resolve the issue. I had tried many different ways to solve the problem; I almost ran out

of resources until one of the last resources had the solution. I had never been so proud

of myself for resolving the issue.

I have had two internships in the most recent couple of summers. I worked as a

DevOps engineer intern. One of the projects I completed was to send AWS CloudTrail

logs to Splunk, and then create a dashboard. First, I had to design and develop the

AWS resources and proof of concept. Once the POC was created, I then began writing
the code to make the AWS resources. After using documentation and testing to make

sure everything was working, the logs were being sent to Splunk. Next, I made a

dashboard using specific queries to filter out certain data. The dashboard was built, and

it effectively showed certain data to observe the logs. Without previous projects done at

Iowa State, I would not have been as successful as I was. Courses at Iowa State built

my problem solving and engineering skills, and I was able to show those off with this

project.

I am disappointed in myself that I didn’t attend more clubs or activities. I lift

weights 6 days a week for an hour and a half everyday, so I’m busy outside of school

doing that. I was in a CprE learning community freshman year. It was really enjoyable! It

was so comforting seeing the same CprE students at every class period. I gained a lot

of friends by joining the learning community. I wish I joined an engineering club with

some of those friends because I know I would’ve gained skills and more friends.

As I am almost done with my adventure at Iowa State, I know that I am not done

learning. I know that my future career in cloud will always be learning new tools, new

security topics, and more. I will have to be able to adapt and do self learning to stay

successful. That’s why I’m glad I went to Iowa State because I have been prepared to

learn in the long run. I couldn’t have been better prepared. I am thankful for all the

friends and knowledge I accumulated at Iowa State.