About Me

Who is Zach?

Just your stereotypical computer engineer who dreams BIG. I love learning and am always up for a challenge. One of my primary tenets is to always be improving. I'm ambitious and hate that feeling of stagnation.

Why Purdue?

When I was in Highschool, I always had trouble figuring out what exactly I wanted to do as I grew up. Being an exceptional student in Math and Science, Engineering always seemed like a logical decision for me. After much deliberation, and many campus visits, I finally decided that Purdue was right for me. The quality of the Engineering program, combined with the sprawling extracurricular opportunities the campus had to offer seemed too good to pass up. Entering into Purdue, I was confident that Chemical Engineering was going to be my discipline of choice. One chem lab turned that around quickly, as I learned I found little enjoyment in the scientific approach that chem labs took to learning. After a bit of wandering, I ended up taking a basic circuitry and programming class, and the rest became history. I loved the hands-on aspects of programming, the literal sandbox with endless possibilities was something I quickly fell in love with.

Boiler Gold Rush

Boiler Gold Rush is the one program at Purdue that I can attribute much of my success to. As Purdue's week-long orientation program, my first experience with it was by going through it. BGR was one of the first things that helped me get on my feet at Purdue. Even though I knew nobody when I got to campus for the first time, BGR let me meet other students and start my college experience off right. I decided to get further involved in BGR later in my college career, and became an Orientation leader. The experience was phenomenal. I got to have a great time introducing new students to Purdue and helping them make their first bonds with others. One of my favorite moments from the experience was when I received a Purdue Dad mug from one of my new students. Following this, I continued in the program by becoming a supervisor. As a supervisor, I got experience on the organizational side of Boiler Gold Rush, both ensuring that events ran smoothly, and acting as an intermediary between the event planners and the team leaders. I was also able to develop close friendships with many others within the supervisor class. The supervisor experience is one that has helped mold me into the individual I am today. It's probably one of the single most impactful experiences I've had, and I couldn't be more thankful for it.

Software Engineering at Garmin

I spent the summer of my Junior year interning as a software engineer in Garmin Aviation. I was assigned to a displays team, and thus did a lot of graphics programming, something that I had little exposure to. Over the course of the summer I was able to develop not only into a competent graphics programmer, but also a proficient software engineer. This had been my first experience in a large-scale software development environment. Version Control, code standards, code review, and organization specific tools were all notions I had known about, but had never truly experienced until my time at Garmin. My team leader once said something that stuck with me: "Programming is writing standalone code that has a function, but it becomes software engineering when you have to work collaboratively in large codebases with other engineers, considering the complete impact of the design choices you make." Another thing at Garmin I enjoyed was the impact I was able to have. The work I did felt meaningful and important. I was sure that what I was doing was valuable, and not some busy intern work that would eventually get scrapped. Having the knowledge that the code I wrote would at some point be live on aircraft was also a feeling like no other.