I am now a senior in college. If you go by credit hours, I will be a super-senior in December. Technically I am 14 months and 2 days from graduating college. What does all this mean? It means I am starting to try to figure out what I want to do with the rest of my life. On Wednesday, the Computer Science Department here at UNI hosted a seminar on grad school. I decided to take off work and check it out.
I had always had the idea of grad school in the back of my head as a potential future possibility (a lot of uncertainty in that phrase, no?). Last month, Dr O’Kane had brought up the GRE’s and the idea of grad school in one of my classes. It got me thinking a little more about the idea. I have really enjoyed college. I feel more comfortable sitting in a classroom than perhaps anywhere else. After all, it is the primary thing I’ve done for the past 16 years of my life. I am also extremely talented at it if I may say so without sounding a bit too presumptuous. I like listening to lectures. I learn a lot from them. I used to jokingly think I should be a student for the rest of my life. I could just continue to take various degrees and quite literally never graduate. These thoughts inevitably lead me to the notion of going to grad school. Let’s not forget that I could carry on the Dr. Sparks title too! 
The seminar turned out to be only the department head (Dr. Wallingford), a professor (Dr. O’Kane), and me. At least I got a lot of personal attention. With me not graduating until after next fall, I got told I have plenty of time to think about things and figure it out. I also have yet to do my undergrad research. I am planning on doing it in my last semester. It was suggested that I do that in a topic related to what I would like to do with my graduate studies should I pursue that particular path. I really don’t know what I would want to study if I did go to grad school. I know it would be in Computer Science. I love history, but I find myself occupying more and more of my time with computer stuff every day. I see the history degree turning into a great hobby when I need a break from computers. It also rounds out my education really well so I am glad I will have the B.A. in history. Seeing as how I didn’t know what I really was interested in yet or where I would want to go, they recommended I just start researching various universities and professors. This would be first and foremost. Once I had a few ideas, I could take the GRE next fall and any other tests if required by my hopeful schools. Then it would come to applications and seeing where I would end up.
I spent a fair amount of time later that evening when I got home looking at universities and their computer science programs. Most really did not reach out and grab my attention. The two that did so far were the Colorado University and the University of Texas. Both have some interesting software research going on. A professor at Texas definitely caught my attention the most. He does some research on web technology which I have yet to fully look into. He also does a lot of research on object-oriented ideas and inheritance. That is the stuff I am really good at and enjoy. I have actually been considering toying with some of those ideas in web applications. Now you see why this Dr. Cook from Texas was so appealing to me. I have been slowly developing ideas about doing my undergrad research on a similar topic. I also want to try it out with some of the websites I build.
I’ve recently started working on a new website. As many of you know, I frequently participate in a videogame clan. This includes not only playing games online with them, but running a website for them. Well, a few of us have decided to expand our involvement in the videogame culture. One website we regularly compete on in amateur tournaments is Gamebattles.
We have several complaints against Gamebattles. A lot of the admins are pricks. Most of them our high schoolers on power rushes. This results in the rules being horribly thrown by the wayside and very subjective rulings coming into play. They also tend to be aggravated by teams who repeatedly submit tickets because their opponents are breaking the rules. Rather than these teams who are trying to play legit getting wins for their efforts, they are punished for using the system put in place by Gamebattles. I don’t want to say all the admins and refs are corrupt, but a lot of them are. The few good ones tend to be lost in the sway, rubbed the wrong way by corrupt superiors (as I once was), or just too few make a difference.
When things go smoothly, the competition is awesome. I know all the KOR guys love it. We feed off of it. It gets to the point that we literally scheduled practices to get prepared for upcoming matches. We plan out our strategies. We have leaders to give out quick orders in the heat of the fray. We have even worked on a means for quite literally developing our own “playbook” of sorts. This is how KOR really got off its feet in the beginning. It started as a few guys playing together for fun. Then they got involved in GB (Gamebattles) and things took off from there.
So what does all this have to do with me building a new website? Well, some of us have gotten frustrated with GB for the above mentioned reasons. Some of us enjoy getting involved in various web development projects. So what does that all add up to? We sat around talking one day and got the idea we should make our own. Now we are actually starting to put some serious effort into it. We needed a name first. Since we needed a web domain to go with our name, we started ruling out names we couldn’t get a domain for easily. Finally, we came up with Champions of Gaming. I’m not providing a link here because we are still in the very early stages of development. We haven’t even purchased the domain we intend to use. I suspect this will come back to seriously haunt me if someone purchases before we do…
So the other week, I was talking to a few people about religion. Being the group of humorous people that we are, we had got on the topic by making jokes about each other’s respective denominations. I tend to bash on Catholics just because it’s so easy. It just happens to turn out that the majority of the people I hang out with have a Catholic upbringing. Meanwhile, they enjoy bashing on Baptists (aka my upbringing). In other words, we have a mutual affection for each other.
The result of this conversation was that Dana, a roommate’s girlfriend, and I decided while we were raised Baptist and Catholic, respectively, we now consider ourselves to be “apathists.” This name being based on the word apathy, of course. We’ve dealt with the debates between Christianity and other religions, along with the debates between denominations. Ultimately, we’ve both come to the conclusion that we just don’t care.
At least from my perspective, does it even matter if there is a God? I am going to go out into the world every day trying to be the best person I can be no matter what. It isn’t about whether there is a Heaven or Hell. It isn’t because I owe it to the community of humanity. It has nothing to do with anyone or anything other than myself. I want to be the best person I possibly can be. Do I need to believe in a God to do this? No. Am I an atheist for saying such? No. I am simply a person who does not care. These days, when someone asks me directly if I believe in God, I almost never give a direct answer. The reason is that it is not important to me. Thus, I have converted to apatheism.