It was her first computer science course, taken during her first year at Hamilton, and Maya Montgomery ’18 expected it would be the only computer science course she’d ever enroll in. Turns out she loved it but didn’t want to jump in too fast.
“I didn’t want to think after one class that I had found a major, so I took the next class. And then I kept signing up for computer science classes as I went along and eventually decided I can just stick with this,” she says. That’s for sure. Montgomery works on the help desk in Hamilton’s technology services and is a computer science teaching assistant. She spent the summer after her sophomore year working full-time as part of a team on a project to develop a dialect for the programming language Python.
Montgomery loves computer science in part because it involves devising a good way to fix a problem.
“It really challenges me a lot more than other courses might, in so many different ways – in terms of the courses being rigorous and in terms of how creative I need to get and how collaborative I need to get. And in just how much work needs to go into figuring out how to solve the puzzle,” says Montgomery, who also majors in Japanese studies. She’d be glad to find some way to combine her two majors after graduation, but computer science is where she sees herself building a career.
