Week 1: Fresh Start

Hey everyone, welcome to my blog! I’m Chris, and I’m a S-STEM/TRAIN scholar. If you’d like to know more about me, feel free to check out my bio. Now let’s get started!

This is a whole new major for me that I’ve always wanted to pursue, but never did until now. This week’s been quite the eventful one. 

I’ve made three or so trips to the main campus to speak with an advisor about my degree appearing to be incorrect. Originally, I was an Information Technology major, and I applied for an ASU transfer in Applied Computing, but it kept changing my major to an Associates in Arts for some reason. Multiple advisor visits and phone calls and messages later, it turns out that it’s….correct? An Associates in Arts is required to go into their Applied Computing program. Let that sink in for a second. Weird, right? At least everything’s correct.

Aside from that, I’ve been getting settled into my new classes and attempting to learn the basics of Java. Work on the research project is going well, but I’m still in the exploratory phase. I’m thinking about writing a paper on Apple’s controversial CSAM detection in iCloud Photos, which, although I’m sure they have good intentions behind it, is flawed and has tons of potential for abuse by the government – not to mention the fact that it’s an invasion of privacy despite not directly looking at photos, but rather looking at hash data. Most people (hopefully) have nothing to hide, but that doesn’t mean that having a corporation snoop through private images is okay. I’m looking for articles and more information at the moment, but I’m likely going to do my research project on that.



This is my main “work machine” for the semester; I have a Mac mini parked at my desk, but this one’s for when I feel like roaming around. I’m more of a laptop guy, but iPads are surprisingly capable nowadays - excellent for note taking, which I’m definitely going to need to do this semester with the research project and all.

I’ll report back next week! Over and out.

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