I failed a programming course in high school. Decided programming was not for me, went to college for mechanical engineering instead, and spent the next decade being right about that. I was wrong.
A master’s in mechanical engineering, a QC job certifying pipe fittings for nuclear submarines, and seven years of flight hardware design later, I started writing Python at work because the MATLAB scripts were not enough anymore. I automated parts of my own job, built small internal tools, and discovered I liked it the way I liked building my first PC at 13: the kind of like that does not go away when you ignore it.
The second attempt
So in 2023 I enrolled at CSU Monterey Bay for a BS in Computer Science, nights and weekends, while working full-time at Boeing. The high school failure stayed with me until I figured out the boring truth: it was never aptitude. It was timing, and a teenager’s attention span. Showing up as a working engineer changed everything. I already knew how to debug, because I had spent years debugging hardware. I already knew how to break big problems into pieces, because that is mechanical design. The degree filled in the theory.
I finished in April 2026. The piece of paper says computer science. What it really certifies is that I can keep a promise to myself across three years of weeknights.
At Boeing I do root-cause investigation on out-of-production commercial fleets. The degree changed how I do that in three ways: I can talk to data teams as a peer, I build tools that keep an investigation honest instead of trusting a spreadsheet, and I have gotten genuinely good at keeping AI coding agents on task, which is the most fun thing I have learned to do with a computer since the cybercafe.
The capstone that was also fun
GG Swarm started as my capstone project at CSUMB: training simulated drone swarms to figure out formation flying on their own, with no central planner micromanaging them. NVIDIA Isaac Lab, shared-policy PPO, and enough math to keep a graduate student busy. It was schoolwork that did not feel like it, and it has outlived the semester. Real hardware is next, assuming I do not break anything expensive.
The degree did not turn me into a different kind of person. I still think like a mechanical engineer first, which means I trust empirical results over assertions, and I still have zero tolerance for BS once there is a real technical problem in front of me. The computer science training just gave that instinct better tools.
And yes, before you ask: I am not enrolling in anything else. The arc can stop climbing for a minute. I have three degrees, a day job investigating airplanes, a rover, and a drone swarm that is about to meet real hardware. That is plenty of problems to keep me busy.
The failed high school course is now a funny story I tell at the start of my bio. It took me two decades to get here, but I got here the long way around, and it turns out the long way is where all the good stuff happened.