Prologue: Why I went to College

Through most of high school, I was of the opinion that college was stupid, overpriced, and overrated. I was appalled at what was being charged for tuition, and I was seeing that jobs were less and less requiring college degrees. Especially in my field of software development, I was very aware that it was possible for talented engineers to land meaningful jobs without having a degree. However, back in 2024, the software development industry was in a period of extreme instability, with LLMs writing code, and many prominent voices saying things like “software development is dead” and “no one will ever have to write code again.” At the time, I was definitely aware that at least part of it was marketing hype, having tried some free AI software development tools myself, and being severely disappointed in the slop they churned out. Then again, I assumed that with more money and time, the tech-founder-class would live up to their promises. Anyone who spent any amount of time on LinkedIn during that period should be well aware of the circle-jerk of lunatics pronouncing that software development was dead, and that anyone who was not having AI write all their code was going to be left behind. This state of affairs left me very unsure of my career path, and searching for more stability.
That search for stability led me to looking at colleges. From a purely statistical perspective, I knew that going to a college dramatically increased my chances of landing a software development job. Additionally, doing so would give me more time to develop my skills and network.

I looked at WPI, CSU, Regis University, the South Dakota School of Mines, and the Colorado School of Mines. All these schools were decent options in some regard, but only WPI, SD Mines, and CO Mines had the combination of hardware and software engineering present in meaningful ways. WPI was ridiculously expensive, however, and many of my concurrent enrollment credits would not transfer there, so that knocked it off the table. Finally, I was pretty much settled on SD Mines, but while I was touring up there, I submitted some hail-mary scholarship applications to scholarships for the Colorado School of Mines. I’ll post links to my grewcock essay and harvey essay here. I felt very proud of the work I had produced, but as a white man, I knew that DEI was not on my side.

Here’s a couple pictures from my trip to South dakota

After a couple weeks, I got an email from CO Mines, informing me that I had been selected for an interview with the Harvey full-ride scholarship. A couple days later, I got another email informing me I have been selected to interview for the Grewcock Presidential Scholarship (Also Full-Ride). I was absolutely elated, having been thinking about going to the Colorado School of Mines for a while. Interviewing for both scholarships, I asked how many applicants would be interviewed, and how many would be accepted. From their responses, I made this spreadsheet:

Looking back, I had a leg up in the interview game due to my previous job-searching, and all the interview prep that I did for that; assuming a perfectly random chance of success for both of these interviews was probably an incorrect call. After less than a week, I got a phone call from an unknown number, informing me that I had received the Harvey full-ride scholarship. A couple days later, I received a call informing me that I had also received the Grewcock presidential scholarship. This was a bit of a shock, to say the least. For a couple minutes, I was under the impression that since I got both of them, I would have enough money to not only pay for college, but have a bunch of extra money as well. Looking back on it, that thought sounds silly, but I think it could have been worth it to push a bit harder. Regardless, they told me that I had to pick one, so after talking with a Grewcock scholar that I knew from her involvement in FRC, I went with that. I also declined the offer to the South Dakota School of Mines, since the Colorado School of Mines now made more sense economically.

Moving to Mines

I wrapped up my summer, quit both my jobs, and at 11:15AM on Saturday, August 16, 2025, I arrived for my move-in slot at the Colorado School of Mines. I moved in, and that evening, we had a convocation where the president and provost of the school gave some remarks, and then we went out to a final barbeque that my family attended.

There were a bunch of events in that first week, but the highlight was going to Oredigger Camp. Going provided me the experience of meeting many of my floor-mates, and generally having a good time. We went up to the YMCA at Estes Park for the event, and had a lot of fun playing gaga ball, trying to roller skate, and eating the dining hall food. I liked it so much I actually got a job as a counselor for next year, but now I’m getting ahead of myself. On the final morning, I got an invitation to join some people for a time of prayer. I decided to join them, and that experience of deeply praying with a group of other believers for 2 hours was unlike anything I had ever experienced. I know many people may think things like “the power of prayer” are a joke, but I assure you that they are real. James 5:16 says, “Therefore, confess your sins to one another and pray for one another, that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous person has great power as it is working.”

After we got back from Oredigger Camp, there were a couple events, like the M-climb, and a silent disco. I got a lot of free time to meet my classmates, including going to all our classes, and finding some interesting spaces around Mines. Some fascinating places and things worth looking at include the ancient books in the library, a secret stairwell under Stratton Hall, and a very unfortunately shaped table. Even with these adventures, classes were soon upon me.

Classes

Anyway, back to classes. I’m gonna give a brief description here, before I get back to chronicling the events and projects I took part in.

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  • CSCI 210: Linux and C: A fun course that made me learn the basics of C, and basic kernel functions in Linux, as well as a host of Linux commands. I also learned how to use Pipes and FIFOs, and deepened my knowledge of SSH. I had been using Linux for a while, so I already knew the basics, but it was a great class for filling in the gaps.
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  • HASS 215: Critical Minerals and Mining Futures: In this interesting course, I rotated through 3 seminars, all focused on some aspect of critical minerals or mining. In the first seminar, with Dr. Nicole Smith, I learned about lithium mining through research on the Thacker Pass project. Then, I went to a seminar with Dr. Tom Brady. He provided me with a better understanding of the time-value of money, and what the internal budget of a mining operation looks like. Finally, I had a seminar with Dr. Jihye Kim, who instructed us on renewable supply chains for critical minerals. For this class, I did a significant amount of literature review and study on different processes for direct lithium extraction, including adsorption, ion-exchange-resins, polymer nano-membrane extraction, and good ol’ organic solvent extraction. Through all of these classes, I grew in my knowledge and interest of mining processes. I may try to get a job at a mining company in the future. Who knows?
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  • CSCI 358: Discrete Math: If you look up what discrete math is on a search engine, it will tell you that discrete math is all the math that is not continuous. That is an accurate description, but it may be more helpful to list the concepts we went through in that class. The class went over: boolean algebra, proofs, contradiction, contrapositions, inductive proofs, strong inductive proofs, counting, probability, closed-form solutions of recursive functions, and set theory, including graph theory, and traversals of graphs. If you don’t know what any of those things are, I’m very sorry, because they’re probably the coolest concepts in math, and everyone should learn them.
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  • PHGN200: Physics 2: just your basic E&M course. The class had a lab at 8:30 in the morning, which was kinda annoying, but very manageable. We learned about electric fields, voltage, flux, basic circuits, and many more things I can’t be bothered to mention.
• CSM 101: Freshman Success Seminar: In this seminar, I essentially received a lecture each week on a basic part of being an adult. Most of the skills I was not new to, and I usually didn’t want to go. Looking back with hindsight, however, I’m glad it gave me the opportunity to get to know the people in that class a bit better.

Extracurriculars

In addition to classes, I also was a part of a couple extracurricular activities.

Since before I came to Mines, I was planning on joining the Crown Hill Church Plant. I had heard the lead pastor Mark Luebe speak at a youth retreat in fall of 2024, and he exhorted all the juniors and seniors there to check his church plant out. When I moved to Mines, the church had yet to start services, so the fledgling congregation would go to Redemption Church Denver as a group. The pastor, James Rathmann, was finishing up a series on ecclesiastes, which I was a massive fan of, as ecclesiastes is my favorite book of the bible. This continued until Crown Hill had their first church service on Sept 28th. After that point, I’ve been attending nearly every week, and serving on the facilities team, and sometimes running tech for the Band.I’ve greatly enjoyed the capacity to serve that this church has provided me, and both of the lead pastors have been excellent spiritual leaders for me, reminding me of the truths of scripture when they seem far off, and generally being able to provide pastoral wisdom when I need it.

I also rock climbed at the rec center one of two times a week. I’m very grateful to the amazing friends I made at the wall, and all the good times climbing. It is extremely important for me to be active, or else I tend to devolve into hedonism, sensuality, and depression. Rock climbing is one form of physical activity that I find particularly easy to motivate myself to do, unlike things like weight lifting, or running.

Additionally, I got involved in the Oaks Ministry at the Colorado School of Mines. I had actually met with the leader of the ministry at mines, Brian Hanneman, and was eager to get involved in the ministry. Every week, we would start at 7:00 PM on wednesdays, and then either listen to a speaker or testimony, before breaking into small groups for a short bible study. The bible studies were never very strictly structured, and usually, most of the group would not have prepared or studied the passage beforehand. I didn’t really care, but I would have preferred a bit more structure and buy-in from the group. Even so, we had a lot of great conversions studying scripture, and I was pleasantly surprised by how large the ministry was. I thought that academia would be a world absolutely dominated by secular humanism, and to some extent it is, but in such places, the gospel is needed all the more. Science and technology do a good job at explaining how certain processes and phenomena occur, but they fall flat on their face when asked to give an account as to why.

Projects

Cimmer Down

I had 3 main projects during my first semester. By far, my main project was CIMmer down, but that is large enough of a project to be it’s own blog post.

Combat robot

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/e28ziBhlXYA

Firstly, I joined a combat robot team. We designed a horizontal drum spinner robot, and got it within weight literally the night before the competition. The center of mass was off-balance, so the robot vibrated out of control whenever it was spinning really fast. Ultimately, we lost our first two rounds, due to the horizontal spinner getting friction-welded to the side of itself. Even with the disappointing results, working with the robot helped me develop my CAD skills, and learn about a hobby I had long been interested in.

SPORK

I joined my friend Asher and 2 other guys to work on a Small Palm-sized Omni-Mobile Robotic Kat. Asher actually already made a great video about it. I spent long grueling hours reading through the 248 page datasheet of the chip that we decided to use, and trying to get the chip to do anything vaguely interesting. I was working on a USBPD board that would configure itself as a sink device, and then use two other chips to maintain a CC-CV profile for recharging the battery of the robot, and another for balancing the 3 series cells. From the start, I knew that there was going to be an element of janky-ness in this project. To put the chip into boot-mode, I was told I needed to short the USB D+ pin to +3.3v. Some of the pins were misconfigured, and required specific configuration to change. Also, the datasheet I mentioned earlier was often contradicted by the official library shipped by the manufacturer. In many cases, I wasn’t sure which one to trust, so I would try both, and neither would work. I eventually got fed up and tried to read the output of the I2c SDA and SCL lines with an oscilloscope, and it showed me that there was no output occurring. I did get the USB device to register itself as a device, and to read and write serial data using DMA and ring buffer, but I was not able to do much else. I was pretty disappointed by the lack of visible progress that I made on the project, but I was satisfied with how much I had learned about the USB protocol, USBPD, and with embedded systems generally. It’s a very interesting field, albeit much more challenging than other software sub-industries, like web development, or app development.

Random Stories and Happenings in Vaguely Chronological Order

Pretty early in the semester, I made some door-stops for my floor-mates:

Also, a couple weeks into the semester, I went on a retreat with my scholarship cohort, again to the YMCA at estes park.

Around this time, I got banned from using the Mines Maker Society space.

I was embroidering a “Soli Deo Gloria” design into a hoodie, when the bobbin got stuck, and caused a massive rats-nest in the back.

https://youtube.com/shorts/bIj9tDVnZ_o

I broke a bunch of needles trying to fix it, and looking back, I should have just waited and told an officer what was going on. Regardless, after a 2-week probationary period, I was reinstated to being able to use the space, and I now have a functional relationship with the leadership in the space.

I also volunteered at KCMT at Regis University with the Mines First Alumni Association. Volunteering at that event was a great opportunity to serve the organization that grew and developed me so greatly in high school.

A few weeks later, I joined the Outdoor rec center for a canyoneering trip out to utah. Our guides were amazing, and I’d love to do it again. One of my favorite HS professors named Mr. Stober was a huge fan of canyoneering, so it was great to see what he loved so much about it. The one downside is that it absolutely destroyed my pants. I’m considering sewing some tarp material to my butt next time I go out.

After fall break, I was pretty locked-in on projects and schoolwork. I don’t have photos of anything except projects and schoolwork until November 18th, when I made some eggnog for my friends at Oaks

From this point onward, I was pretty exclusively locked in on finishing CIMmer down, but I did find time to make a cursed bolt for a white elephant gift exchange. I hope you never come across it. There was a rule against 3d-printed items, but there was no rule against using a 3d-printed mold to urethane-cast an item, so we (my roommate and I) went with that, somehow making it more cursed. My roommate also made a driver for the bolt, but that’s his story to tell. You can ask him if you ever run into him.

Finally, as the semester came to a close, I ramped up my involvement in Advent of Code, a competitive programming advent calendar. I finished second in my leaderboard, though it was a close one.

Final thoughts

I’m very glad I chose to attend the Colorado School of Mines. I started out very cynical about college, and to some extent I still am, but the scholarship made the finances much more reasonable for me, and I’ve been very blessed by all the opportunities this school has provided. Attending let me take many interesting and relevant courses, and meet many thoughtful and passionate people. I was able to join many amazing projects, and get generous funding for them! If you are reading this right now and are considering applying to college, just go for it. You never know if you’ll get a crazy full-ride scholarship like I did. The Lord works in mysterious ways.