8/20/2019 Benjamin Culkin Scholarship Essay

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My name is Benjamin Culkin, and I am a sophomore majoring in ComputerScience at West Virginia Institute of Technology. I plan on joining the workforce straightout of college. The ideal job for me would be software maintenance for Java programsat an established software company. This is for multiple reasons, the first of which is Iwant a stable job, and am not initially wanting to work for a “startup” until I am more

seasoned. Secondly, I would prefer to get deeply involved with a single code base andbecome familiar with it rather than have to figure out how to solve a particular problemand then leave that solution for others to maintain. In short, I want a job where I can getdeeply focused on a specific problem and become an authority on it, rather than havingto learn a little of a variety of problems.

I am confident in my choice of position because, this past summer, I did the exactopposite at a local “hack-a-thon”. A friend from high school, an older gentleman and Ibuilt a food-truck tracking web app for a local non-profit in under 24 hours. While I likedcollaborating with other people to produce an app for people who couldn’t afford to payfor it otherwise, I didn’t like the steps we had to take to make all the technical decisionsfor that upfront, and I don’t particularly like leaving something of mine to be maintained

by others.In the terms of academic honors, I have been on the Dean’s List each semester

of my enrollment and last year received an award for Outstanding Freshman in mymajor. When I’m not occupied with academic pursuits, one of the main things I enjoy isreading. Most of what I read is reference nonfiction with small amounts of fiction mixedin whenever I get bored. I have an interesting way of picking out books to read which isto wander to a random section of the library and pick out books that interest me fromthat area. Most of what I end up with is either guides to miscellaneous practical skills(blacksmithing, brewing, and agriculture have been topics) or references to help with aparticular side project I’ve been working on. I also enjoy hiking, as not only does itprovide a good source of exercise, but it helps me weave the scattered trails of my

thoughts into a more cohesive whole.I mentioned side projects earlier, and many of those are recreational

programming exercises. My main project currently is what’s known as Markov chaingenerator. Skipping over the theory behind it, the basic effect of it is you feed it simplerules on how to generate text and it generates complex passages based off of thoserules. Technology like this is what helps drive Apple’s Siri and other sorts of artificialintelligence to respond to you in more human ways.

I currently have two part-time campus jobs, one as help assistant in the computerlabs for the CS department, the other as a research job involving parallel computationunder Dr. Afrin Naz. The former job mainly involves helping any CS students who comein with questions on lab or homework assignments.

As far as volunteer work, every semester I help the ACM put on TechLan, whichis a big LAN party; we gather together and play various games to raise money forcharity. Most of the work I do for them is physical, helping set up the tables and movenetwork equipment into place, but it’s necessary labor. I also help do demonstrations forthe ACM for one of the fall tours, where they have groups of middle-schoolers and earlyhigh schoolers looking around the campus at the demonstrations that each of thedepartments puts on.

8/20/2019 Benjamin Culkin Scholarship Essay

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In conclusion, I do plan to complete my degree in Computer Science at WestVirginia Institute of Technology and being awarded a scholarship would help greatly tosee that the plan becomes a reality. This is especially true because this year my brotherwill start attending college in the fall of 2016, and I would like to ease the burden on myparents as much as possible.