To be completely honest, I've never had a clear plan or path that lead me to where I am today. Much of my education has been a consequence of simply selecting courses that I found interesting and challenging. As a consequence, I developed interests in a variety of areas and seriously considered Bachelor studies in jazz, german and mathematics. Ultimately, my enjoyment of highschool mathematics and physics led me to pursue a conjoint degree in engineering and physics. In my first year, I found both the introductory software engineering course and my general education critical thinking philosophy course the most engaging and fulfilling. In many ways, programming is simply an extension of algebra and logic, replacing the classic 'x' with more meaningful variable names based on the context that in turn introduces diverse logical problems. Consequently, it just made sense for me to specialise in software.
Following this decision, I continued to select the courses I found most interesting, sometimes at the expense of my GPA. This often resulted in me taking courses biased towards the mathematical and theoretical aspects of software engineering, and suggests I probably could have done computer science instead. Eventually, I dropped the physics component switching to just BE(Hons) to reduce the duration of my studies to four years, though I thoroughly enjoyed the physics courses I had taken. By the time I reached my honours year, I was lucky enough to be allocated for the research project that was my top pick, studying reinforcement learning AI under the supervision of Dr. Henry Williams from the University of Auckland CARES lab. It was during this project that I realised the courses I had selected - data structures and algorithms, dynamic programming, AI and more - that I realised I had unknowingly been preparing for my honours project all along. Having enjoyed the research so much, I followed up with a masters thesis building on the foundation I had established.