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My name is Benjamin Culkin, and I am a sophomore majoring in Computer

Science at West Virginia Institute of Technology. I plan on joining the workforce straight
out of college. The ideal job for me would be software maintenance for Java programs
at an established software company. This is for multiple reasons, the first of which is I
want a stable job, and am not initially wanting to work for a startup until I am more
seasoned. Secondly, I would prefer to get deeply involved with a single code base and
become familiar with it rather than have to figure out how to solve a particular problem
and then leave that solution for others to maintain. In short, I want a job where I can get
deeply focused on a specific problem and become an authority on it, rather than having
to learn a little of a variety of problems.
I am confident in my choice of position because, this past summer, I did the exact
opposite at a local hack-a-thon. A friend from high school, an older gentleman and I
built a food-truck tracking web app for a local non-profit in under 24 hours. While I liked
collaborating with other people to produce an app for people who couldnt afford to pay
for it otherwise, I didnt like the steps we had to take to make all the technical decisions
for that upfront, and I dont particularly like leaving something of mine to be maintained
by others.
In the terms of academic honors, I have been on the Deans List each semester
of my enrollment and last year received an award for Outstanding Freshman in my
major. When Im not occupied with academic pursuits, one of the main things I enjoy is
reading. Most of what I read is reference nonfiction with small amounts of fiction mixed
in whenever I get bored. I have an interesting way of picking out books to read which is
to wander to a random section of the library and pick out books that interest me from
that area. Most of what I end up with is either guides to miscellaneous practical skills
(blacksmithing, brewing, and agriculture have been topics) or references to help with a
particular side project Ive been working on. I also enjoy hiking, as not only does it
provide a good source of exercise, but it helps me weave the scattered trails of my
thoughts into a more cohesive whole.
I mentioned side projects earlier, and many of those are recreational
programming exercises. My main project currently is whats known as Markov chain
generator. Skipping over the theory behind it, the basic effect of it is you feed it simple
rules on how to generate text and it generates complex passages based off of those
rules. Technology like this is what helps drive Apples Siri and other sorts of artificial
intelligence to respond to you in more human ways.
I currently have two part-time campus jobs, one as help assistant in the computer
labs for the CS department, the other as a research job involving parallel computation
under Dr. Afrin Naz. The former job mainly involves helping any CS students who come
in with questions on lab or homework assignments.
As far as volunteer work, every semester I help the ACM put on TechLan, which
is a big LAN party; we gather together and play various games to raise money for
charity. Most of the work I do for them is physical, helping set up the tables and move
network equipment into place, but its necessary labor. I also help do demonstrations for
the ACM for one of the fall tours, where they have groups of middle-schoolers and early
high schoolers looking around the campus at the demonstrations that each of the
departments puts on.

In conclusion, I do plan to complete my degree in Computer Science at West


Virginia Institute of Technology and being awarded a scholarship would help greatly to
see that the plan becomes a reality. This is especially true because this year my brother
will start attending college in the fall of 2016, and I would like to ease the burden on my
parents as much as possible.

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