From Student to Engineer

Open Source Lab

Compared to my peers, I felt a step behind. I had only discovered computer science as a degree option halfway through my first year of college, while many others had already taken high school classes or attended coding bootcamps. That changed during my second year when I stumbled upon a job posting at the Oregon State University [Open Source Lab (OSL)](https://osuosl.org/) for a Student Systems Engineer position. At the time, I had no idea what that entailed—I hadn’t even heard of the term “open source.”

The OSL program is designed to grow students into engineers. They don’t expect you to know everything or ace the technical interview. It was exactly the environment I needed to bridge the gap between classroom assignments and real-world engineering tasks.

At the OSL, I learned new languages like Ruby and applied them to automation tasks using Chef. I was also put on a rotating “on-call” schedule, where tickets submitted by OSL clients would be assigned to me. These became the most challenging—and rewarding—tasks of the job. Suddenly, the stakes were real. I wasn’t just aiming for an A; I was responsible for functional, reliable code.

OpenStack

A few months after