Featured Student: Roshan Bhatia

Bio

Course of Study: CS Major, Religious Studies Minor

Hometown: San Diego, CA

Main Interests: Distributed Systems, Network Security, Loud Music, Basketball

Github: https://github.com/roshbhatia

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/roshan-bhatia-2b1970a7/

What’s some advice you have for other computationally minded students?

Work on some personal projects! To be honest, just doing the coursework isn’t going to prepare you for the industry — and probably isn’t really that interesting. Find something you’re passionate about and work on it! For me, finding a group of friends who facilitated my interests really helped (thanks Pim!)

What project or experience (in computing) are you most proud of?

Without a doubt my favorite experience/project was working on the BLT cluster with the rest of Digital Initiatives. It was a lot of responsibility, and I definitely broke things along the way, but all in all it was an incredible experience that has allowed me to help facilitate projects among other students and faculty among many disciplines. My favorite programming project was working on a performance monitoring/testing platform at an internship last summer. Frontend is really not my favorite thing, but I learned a lot about React and javascript, and the backend was written in a couple different languages. It really gave me a lot of insight into how to write production level code quickly and efficiently — I learned a lot about microservices and CICD tools, as well as design patterns, all of which I use in my personal projects now.

What’s your favorite thing about CS (or math) at LC?

Without a doubt the community. It’s no secret that the department doesn’t have a whole ton of funding, but the students find a way to make it work. Programming Club and ACM especially provide a lot of opportunity to engage with the department and other students. It also helps that Digital Initiatives exists, as Jeremy is a fantastic resource for helping start projects.

What’s your favorite programming language?

I love Python — It has its issues but its so frickin’ easy to prototype stuff. I used to be a Java hater but now I think the JVM is really nice, Scala is becoming my new thing.

What has been your favorite course at LC?

Definitely Advanced Computer Graphics. Jeff is always a blast to have as a professor, and we implemented some pretty complex algorithms and features I would have definitely thought was not doable by my own. Writing a functioning raytracer was definitely the highlight of the course, and having something to show off to employers was cool too.