Student Interview
Tucker Irwin is one the best friends I have at UNC. We’ve lived in the same suite/apartment since freshman year and I’ve always admired his work ethic. One of the main reasons I was inspired to direct and film an interview with Tucker was because of the hard work he puts in with his studies in order to prepare himself for the computer science workforce. He’s someone I admire and I hope to someday put in the hours of work he puts in to master his craft.
Tucker is taking 4 classes this semester. 3 of them are computer science classes while the final class is a mathematics class that revolves around statistics.
Comp 475 – 2D Computer Graphics is a class that teaches fundamentals for software of 2D graphics. This includes teaching about scan conversion, clipping, transformations, compositing, and texture sampling. During my filming of B-Roll for the interview, I watched Tucker battle through one project in this class, which entailed him coding an exact replica of a complex picture his professor created. Tucker’s version of it looked exactly the same as the professors, yet there was a lot that the coding system found that was wrong with his. This speaks to the level of coding students are working with in this class.
Comp 311 – Computer Organization is a class that introduced students to the components of a microprocessor and assembly programming. Students learn binary in this class along with assembly language.
Comp 590 – Foundations of Software Engineering is a class that teaches the fundamentals of Computer Vision. Students learn how to process images and extract features from them, construct and deconstruct both 3D and 2D images, and develop a machine that can identify objects.
Stor 535 – Probability for Data Science is a class that teaches students techniques and tools for analyzing data and machine learning. Tucker talked about this class in the interview. He said that while it’s not a computer science class, he’s getting to learn a lot about machine learning and AI programming, which is one topic he’s heavily interested in.
Source: Coursicle
Tucker completed an internship this summer with Wrangle, a small company with eight employees, where he did full stack development. Full stack development includes both frontend and backend development. Frontend development works more with aesthetics rather than what backend works with.
During the internship, Tucker worked with tickets and work flow systems integrated with slack. Tickets are submitted by companies who need a change made on their products. The tickets, through Wrangle, are assigned to a worker to be changed. Tucker did three specific things for the company during his internship:
- Made the due dates of tickets time zone dependent
- Edited the order of assignments within the tickets
- Coded and created a role-based access control system
