Meet the Team: Richie Goulazian!
The Meet the Team blog series is CSC’s initiative to introduce our team to the rest of the world. Today, we are introducing our Director of Initiatives Richie, a sophomore pursuing a Computer Science degree.
Richie grew up in Newtown, Pennsylvania, a really (really) boring suburb outside of Philadelphia. One fun fact about him is that he is really into game development and video games in general. When he was in high school and had more time, he would often be programming custom game engines. Additionally, when he was in elementary school he ran a Minecraft server business 😊 (impressive, right?).
How has your college experience been so far?
His experience with Pitt so far is that he thinks it’s a modest school in the best ways possible. Pitt doesn’t lack the go-getters and hard workers, but avoids a stress culture and competitiveness among the students, which makes it an overall fantastic place to learn and grow. In addition to being apart of CSC, he has dabbled in research through the FER (First Experiences in Research) program. In his free time, he sometimes works on personal projects, but he mostly aims to become a more well-rounded person (by doing something other than CS), because he feels as though you can only do your best work if you understand what’s going on around you.
What’s your experience with CSC been like?
After joining CSC freshman year, Richie wanted to be an officer for CSC because he loved the “scrappy” attitude of the CS students here at Pitt and wanted to contribute to that. Regardless of the fact that our CS program isn’t world-renowned, Pitt CS students continue to succeed through their own volition. He’s excited to promote more hands-on activities in CSC that motivate students to get their hands dirty with personal projects more often. Currently, he is working on a 6-week CSC project competition that hopes will do just that!
What advice do you have for freshmen?
One advice he’ll say to freshmen is that it’s never too late to start. You might think you’re too late to get into some new hobby or learn some new skill because you see people who have been doing it for years or since childhood, but the only thing you can know for sure is that you’re never getting anywhere if you don’t start. Those people were novices at some point too. Secondly, Richie recommends “keeping your eyes close to the ground”. It’s really easy to become paralyzed by getting too caught up in some far-away goal. For example, you might really want to intern at some fancy company, but where do you even start? Instead just try to make the best decisions you can day-to-day and trust the process. Before you know it, you’ll be much closer to that goal.
