A Bit About My Life at Hope College

When I was told I would have to take a science class at Hope College, I was less than thrilled. Science was never my best subject and I thought it would all be over in high school since I never wanted to go into a career that required science. Computer science seemed like the best choice to take since it didn't require chemistry, learning about plants, or going out into Lake Michigan to take water samples. Little did I know that I would actually learn a lot from my computer science class and how it relates to my life at Hope College.

The first chapter in our computer science textbook was about bits, bytes, and storing information. Every day of my life I use my laptop to store information. The other day my RA asked for some one to donate a CD so we could have a CD of chapel music for our cluster. I handed her one of my blank CD's and ten minutes later she had stored an entire album of music onto the CD and was playing it in her dorm. I also use data storage every time I use my digital camera. I take pictures on my camera and they are stored to the memory card inside of the camera. I then take that memory card and insert it into my computer. The pictures are then stored to my camera's memory and I am able to share them with virtually anyone on Facebook, or another picture sharing site.

I think one of the most obvious ways I use data storage at Hope College is with my flash drive. I use my flash drive every time I go to my lab portion of CSCI. We are assigned labs that must be finished twenty-four hours after the lab. I must save what I did in class on my flash drive and then finish it in another lab. What I saved on my flash drive is saved in bytes, or sometimes when I save pictures they are jpg.files or bit maps. Both of these are concepts we learned about in CSCI.

My computer science class turned out to be way more interesting than I ever thought it would be. It has shown me that we use computer science every day in our live, most of the time we just take it for granted.