Garrett Gaw '99

What is your fondest memory of your time in the CS department?

Long nights working on our senior design project. Whether it was me alone coding in my apartment to my favorite music or working alongside my partner in the CS lab--back when the CS department was still in Fisher--I was totally immersed; I had a grand vision for what we were building; and I felt like all of the classes up to that point had prepared me for that project.

How has your education impacted your career?

When I was at Tech, almost all coding-based classes were C/C++. Starting my junior year, I began to teach myself the cool new language that had just come out, Java. As it turns out, my career has revolved around Java and other more recent languages and vastly evolved architectures. But what I found back then, and still find today, is that my formal CS education taught the fundamentals that everything else is based on and transcends any particular language, development methodology, or design/architectural philosophy. I used to think that my time at Tech and CS degree was to help me learn the social and technical skills to build software as a career. I now realize that they have helped me learn faster on the job, collaborate with teams of all sizes, and facilitate solving challenges that haven’t existed before.

Garrett is a member of the Department of Computer Science External Advisory Board. He also participates in the CS1000 Alumni Assignment project where alumni correspond with first-year computer science students and answer questions they have about the school, the program, the industry, or just life in general at Michigan Tech.