My Story
BS & MS Electrical Engineering | MS Computer Science | AWS Cloud Practitioner
Welcome to my personal digital space, a repository of my educational and professional endeavors. Here, you'll discover insights into my academic journey, projects, publications, certifications, and more.
In the Beginning ...
My journey into the Tech world went from a standstill to full speed in a short period of time. Imagine not having a personal computer until the third year of college—talk about a late start! My first interaction with a computer dates back to 2010 during a senior high school IT class, where the mouse seemed like an alien artifact on a desktop monitor.
Fast forward three years, and I found myself programming in C++ for my undergraduate class in Electrical Engineering at Jimma University, in Ethiopia. This 5-year long undergraduate degree exposed me to a wide array of hardware and software technologies such as electronics & programming.
Post-graduation in 2015, I moved to the Ethiopian capital city Addis Ababa, and worked as an Electrical engineer, for three years. During this time, I also took on small electrical installation projects along with my colleagues and learned how to manage projects and lead a small team.
A new chapter in Germany ...
A pivotal turn arrived in 2018 with a scholarship to pursue a Master's in Electrical Engineering at the historic University of Rostock in Germany, established in 1419.
Studying in Germany provided a valuable opportunity for cultural immersion, learning the German language, connections with fellow international students from diverse backgrounds, and so much more. Pursuing a master’s degree in electrical engineering allowed me to specialize in IT, exploring courses in Software Engineering, Machine Learning for Natural Language Processing, and Cyber Security.
To fulfill master’s degree requirements in Electrical Engineering & IT, I undertook a 9-credit hour semester project analyzing over 3.8 million scientific articles collated from popular scientific journals, revealing significant insights via data mining and analysis using Python programming language. Finally, I have done my master's thesis utilizing BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformer), a cutting-edge deep learning model, for automatic classification of scientific text files.
These academic pursuits strengthened my programming skills and fostered a keen interest in an IT career, inspiring me to consider pursuing a pure computer science degree program in the United States to broaden and add depth to my expertise. Towards the end of 2022, while applying to universities in the US, I got an opportunity to work as a data engineering researcher at the University of Regensburg, almost eighty miles north of Munich.
Yet another new chapter in the United States ...
While immersing myself in the world of data in my data engineering role at the University of Regensburg, I received a full scholarship to study in a graduate computer science program at North Dakota State University (NDSU). I moved to the US just before the end of the year 2022 and started my graduate class in January 2023 (Spring 2023 term).
Presently, I am deeply engaged in advanced graduate computer science coursework. Within this academic sphere, I am also doing projects using Python programming language and its frameworks, particularly Django, alongside database systems such as PostgreSQL, and JavaScript React for front-end designs. My projects involve proficient utilization of various tools, such as Git for version control, virtual environments for deterministic builds, and Docker for application packaging and shipping.
My objective at this moment is landing a summer 2024 internship and learning AWS cloud technologies to obtain the AWS Cloud Certified Architect Associate (SAA-C03) by the end of the year.
Let's connect & collaborate via the links provided on this page!