Hello SC 200! My name is Jeff Nelson, and I am back in Happy Valley for my 5th year at PSU (decided to stay because I like it here so much!) In all seriousness though, I am back this year because I have yet to fulfill the degree requirements for my second major which is IST, my first major is Philosophy. Now you may be wondering how the hell I came up with that combination of majors (and I often ask myself the same question), and it’s an interesting story, however a little too long to share here. Long story short, I declared my Philosophy major with an option in Professional Studies with the intention of choosing a second major or a minor once I transferred from Altoona campus to University Park campus. In my first semester at UP I took IST 110 as an elective and I knew that that was the major for me to complement the one I already declared. I guess in some ways, IST could be considered a science major, but a fair argument could be made in opposition of that stance. I like to consider the majors within the College of IST to be overlapping in some sense but also unique in their own sense as well. For instance, Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) is a heavily scientific major, but components of this major overlap with the different options of an Information Sciences and Technology (IST) which takes some aspects of technical and scientific concepts of CSE and applies that to understand its implications in the world of business, and that is why I chose IST.
I am taking this course because (as I said before) this is my 5th year of college so I only have 4 classes that I have to take over this Fall and next Spring semester to fulfill my degree requirements… hello senior year electives. So I googled “best electives at University Park” and an Onward State article came up “Top 10 electives at University Park”, sure enough SC 200 was at the top of the list, so I decided to give it a shot. I consider myself to enjoy science and learning about new concepts and ideas, but I never had the mental capacity to handle the complex technical knowledge that higher-education science entails. I like to read scientific magazines and watch educational documentaries/TV shows, but I never had the ability to sit through college courses and get graded on my actual comprehension of the material, so when I found out about this class I knew it was right up my alley, and I have a feeling some of my fellow classmates may feel the same way!
As far as the live link goes for this blog post, I wasn’t sure what link to use for this post because it is not required to be about anything scientific necessarily, but I wanted to link to something meaningful. So I decided to link to the website for this analytics application my friend from high school created. The software product is a cloud-based web platform that is called Flow, and this link takes you to the website where you can register and sign up to try out using it for free. The technology behind the software is really quite impressive and has the potential to be ground-breaking because of its myriad of various potential uses. I figured there may be someone in this class who reads this post and checks out this link because it may actually be of use to them if you are looking to become a young entrepreneur/businessperson, or if you know someone close to you who is one, or is in charge of a business that might be interested in this product. If you are interested and want to learn more about the product Flow, here is a link to the LinkedIn & Twitter pages of the startup company 4DIQ which was launched to manage the product and to provide consulting services to clients and customers.
For my picture, I leave you with the best science-related meme I could think of…
