My passion for working with computers

From early age, I had an opportunity to interact with computers and they have been my passion, especially writing code. In my view, coding is like a logic puzzle of which I am fond. The feeling that I can literally create anything from several lines of code and it could be useful to other people encouraged me to absorb more skills and techniques in coding. My love for computers grew even more when college exposed me to computing and I realized that computer science is the field where I can be active in the world.

The subjects I took at A-levels have improved my knowledge of the subject matter. Mathematics for example helped me to develop a problem solving skill and deep understanding of algorithms for computer programs. I have always loved analyzing and solving a problem because it gave me a sense of accomplishment. I am currently working as house prefect, which involves working with teachers to help our boarding house with smooth running. Particularly, mentoring younger students is important facet of prefect duty. I have mentored several younger students and listened some problems they were faced with. Having seen problems from different angle was associated with the way of working out errors in the code and was very stimulative. I believe that being prefect has further improved my leadership and communication skills. As a part of computer science, I personally enjoy coding. Teaching myself Python, Ruby, Java and C++ has enabled me to create advanced programs.

At present, I am developing a software “ Essay Checker” using Python language. This program allows user to identify whether an essay has been copied from My three weeks IT work experience placement gave me a great opportunity to acquire knowledge about how IT company works and skills that are necessary for working as computer programmer from IT professionals. For example no matter what security patch a company use, there is a vulnerability. I have learned the way to find such a security hole to protect data from unauthorized access and malware at the frontline of IT company. Furthermore I have interacted with creating Artificial Intelligence for Semantic Segmentation by using a method called Supervised Learning. Artificial Intelligence is now attracting attention from from the public in many aspects and the experience encourage me to write about Artificial intelligence on my Extended Project Qualification. Having enjoyed my experience at this company so much, with the skills learnt here I intend to pursue a career in cyber security.

There are a large number of orphans in my country. The majority of orphans will have no jobs after they graduated an orphanage since they have not been school. For their future life, I participated in non-profit organization formed especially to help and support children at orphanages called Blue For Japan. I took part in a meeting with members from different business backgrounds and taking advantage of my coding skills, I helped to design to create a webpage by using HTML and CSS for our organization. I am sure that this practical experience will be undoubtedly useful at university an my future career. The usage of computers has skyrocketed in recent years but the majority of companies and individuals are unaware of the security risks. An example of this would be the recent incident where, Ransomware, a malicious software called Wannacry.

The New York Times reported that this malicious software locked more than twenty-three thousand computers and demanded a ransom to release all the computers. In my opinion, it happened because owners of the computers did not apply the necessary security patch to their computers for various reasons : their machines don’t support the patch, it’s too expensive to do it, it might disrupt their services or they simply forget about an outdated computer on their network.

A massive increase in cyber terrorisms and computer crime threaten the integrity of the real world as well as the virtual world I would like to study further into this topic and truly understand this topic to protect the people from cyber-crimes.