Cumulative Reflection

My name is Aiden Petersen, and I’m a senior in Computer Engineering. I decided to attend Iowa State University because of its excellent engineering program. Throughout my time at Iowa State, I gained a lot of work experience in different areas to find what I’m truly passionate about, along with amazing communities in clubs, which have also led to leadership opportunities.

While at Iowa State, I have found amazing communities that have helped me develop personally and professionally. Initially, one of the first clubs I joined was the Swim Club. Swim Club had many amazing people and allowed me to stay fit, which is useful for staying healthy. I was able to compete in US Masters College Club Swimming in 2022 in Atlanta, which was a great experience. I later became the president of the Swim Club, where I gained a lot of experience communicating and leading my board members to ensure that the Swim Club operates properly. Another extracurricular activity that benefited me was competitive programming with Professor Simanta Mitra. This experience cemented many of the advanced programming skills taught in other classes that I otherwise wouldn’t have been able to utilize. This opportunity immensely benefited me in many future computer science classes I had to take.

I have also found many work experiences to discover where I truly enjoyed. After my freshman year, I got a position as a web developer for the IT services web development department. This was my first programming job, which provided me with tons of experience in programming. I continued with this job until the end of my sophomore year when I got an internship at Bio::Neos, where I did a lot more web development. After that internship, I discovered I didn’t enjoy web development very much. I enjoyed CprE 381: Computer Organization and Assembly, so I wanted to get into digital design and hardware. I decided to become a TA for CprE 381 which cemented many of my VHDL skills because I had to teach students how to use it. I was able to leverage this position to become a research assistant position with Professor Henry Duwe, which is what I’m doing right now and am currently enjoying. The TA position was also useful for getting me my first hardware engineering internship at IBM, which I will be working at in the summer of 2023.

All of the work experiences I’ve had have shown me the importance of continuous learning. For example, when I worked at Iowa State ITS, I utilized the Laravel framework as a monolithic framework for full-stack development. Learning how to use Laravel taught me many of the basics of general web development and how to use Laravel. I later did more web development for Bio::Neos. Web development there used a completely different stack of frameworks. We had a split front and back end, unlike Laravel, which required me to learn how to use Express.js and Vue.js to adapt to these changes. The ability to learn and adapt quickly is an important skill in engineering, and I wouldn’t be able to be successful without that skill.

One of my favorite parts of my time at Iowa State has been the Computer Engineering classes, specifically the core curriculum of CprE 281, CprE 288, CprE 381, and CprE 308. These classes touch on vital aspects of how computers work in general. CprE 281 teaches you the basics of digital design, which CprE 381 later builds on to teach you the microarchitectural basics of how CPUs work. CprE 288 teaches you how to interact with CPUs and other devices at a low level, and CprE 308 teaches you how large modern systems work on CPUS using operating systems. The exposure to a variety of concepts and the “full stack” of how a computer works are something I enjoyed. Large final projects also complement this general concept for each class, which allows students to fully understand what they are being taught by implementing it for themselves.

My favorite example so far of a final project has been CprE 381. This class’s final project of creating a pipelined MIPS processor has proved incredibly valuable for me. It taught me the basics of CPUs and potential optimizations that could have been made to them. This class led me to dig deeper than strictly the class’s content by researching concepts such as out-of-order computing and cache coherency, which wouldn’t have been discovered if it wasn’t for this class and its final project. The CprE 381 final project was also an example of how the computer engineering curriculum encourages strong design skills. Because of the project’s complexity, it was almost necessary to plan it before. We had fully mapped out how each instruction correlated to control signals on the processor. To design this system, we had planned everything out but also consulted external resources to complete it, such as the Hennessy and Patterson Computer Architecture textbook, to fully understand how the system should work and the various features we had to implement. These features included data forwarding, pipeline flushing, and branch prediction.

Overall I have enjoyed my college experience at Iowa State. It taught me the importance of self-learning. This was not a skill I had in high school, but university taught me how to pursue my interests and learn independently. I’ve also been able to achieve many career-related achievements and be a part of amazing communities.