Two huge things happened in the span of about a month and I'm still processing both of them.
In January 2024, I finished my B.A. in Computer Science at Queens College! That's two bachelor's degrees from the same school. One in Music Education, one in CS. If 2019 Jorge could see this he'd think I was lying.
Then in February I did HackCUNY 2024. Over 100 participants, 24 hours to build something. My team (Brian, Thomas, Samiha, and me) built an AI academic advisor for Queens College CS students using OpenAI's API and Flask. The idea was to automate degree planning, like "what classes should I take next semester given my grades and what I've already completed?" We pulled in actual grade distribution data to make the recommendations better and got it working for 500+ students.
We won first place!!
I'm not going to pretend I played it cool. I didn't. Standing up there holding that certificate, after every late night, after every time someone gave me a look when I told them I was switching from music to CS... I don't know. It just hit me. Like, OK, maybe I actually belong here.
After the win I got invited to the Google Cloud Next AI Hackathon in Vegas! People in the CS community were starting to know who I was. That's a weird sentence to write but it's true.
Now I need a job. The degree is done, the hackathon trophy is on my shelf. Time to figure out the next part.