Nicholas Redd

Current School or University: California Institute of Technology
Favorite Movie:  Chinatown
Favorite Book: Slaughterhouse Five (currently)
Favorite Quote:  “Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt” – Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five
Who is your Role Model? Elon Musk
My TAG-Ed experience:  I interned last summer for a start up called 4C Talent that needed assistance building out the software that they were bringing to market, a software meant to assist event hosts with hiring temporary contractors. It was an amazing introductory experience into the world of professional data-centric software development.
What I’m doing now: This summer, I have am deciding between two internships, both matched through TAG Ed.  I would be doing programming for either internship role.
Future plans: I plan to pursue a B.Sc. in either Applied Physics or Computer Science at Caltech–I am leaning towards Applied Physics because it is much easier to school yourself and demonstrate what you have learned of programming and Computer Science than in the experiment-based school of Physics (located in million-dollar laboratories). After graduation and a few years of experience in the Engineering Physics industry, I hope to start a company of my own, most likely bringing a software to market. My internship really showed me how such a start up can come about, the effort required to raise it from the ground up, and the skills and technological knowledge one needs if they are to succeed in the highly competitive software industry.
Work/Volunteer experiences shaped by my internship: The upcoming internships I have now directly spawned from my first software engineering internship–I would never have gotten the professional software development background in any other circumstance, and would never have looked as appealing and experienced.