Tyler Maglaya

Cumulative Reflectioin

College has turned me into a very different person than I was in high school. So much so,

that people who I met in high school who haven’t been keeping touch with me, would be

shocked as to how different I am. What I mean is that I was a very introverted person in high

school and the years before that. Working in groups always intimidated me as I had to interact

with my classmates and propose ideas for projects or other problems. Before I moved to Ames, I

told myself, “I have to be involved and meet new people”, and I took that statement to heart.

The dorms at ISU really forced me to be social with everyone else, living in Linden Hall,

a sort of smaller dorm on campus, made me get to know almost everyone on the floor and have a

good relationship with them. Collaborating on homework assignments every night started my

process in how to work on group assignments and make meaningful ideas and train my problem-

solving skills. Also being part of the communities in the dorms made me a leader in

communication and coordination of tasks that need to be done while doing my fair share of

work. But as the semesters went on, more and more dormmates had different classes as me since

they were ME while I was a CprE.

It wasn’t until junior year, where I met my CprE friends that I would start seeing all the

time in classes. In our EE 201 and 230, electrical circuits, and circuits and systems classes,

required a lot of collaboration and leadership in the labs since they required not only being

sufficient in making circuits and using the equipment, but also applying those math equations to

the data we found in the equipment. Not being the greatest at math really made me study hard to

really understand the concepts taught in class and challenged my problem-solving skills. Classes

such as CprE 288 Embedded Systems and 381 Computer organization and Design, all worked in

groups to work on a single project, which helped with group collaboration. These classes put all
 Tyler Maglaya

of what we learned in our past coding classes together with the C coding language. As a member

of the UI team on PuTTY. We had to work closely with our robot team in order to take the

required information from the bot to the screen so that the people controlling the bot had the best

chance at going through the obstacle course. This required a lot of collaboration and coordination

within the groups and pushed me to work great with teams. If not for these classes and being

involved in activities and communities in my college career, then I would not be the successful

student and aspiring computer engineer that I have become today.