About Me
My name is Christopher O'Grady. I am 22 years old and live in Somerville, MA. I graduated from the University of Michigan in May of 2010, and moved to Somerville in September. I earned my bachelor's degree in aerospace engineering, and I also have a broad background in computer programming. I am currently unemployed and looking for work in either an engineering or programming related field.
My resume and contact information are listed in the sidebar to the left, as well as several personal projects I have worked on. Most of these are programming projects that I have been able to develop freely (not counting my computer and electricity). I hope to one day further my project list with creations requiring physical components when I have more income.
I have been programming software since I was 12. I checked out a book from the library one day titled Basic Programming. I enjoyed it so much that I haven't been able to stop coding since then.
My first language was an archaic business language my mother had used at her office called BBX Basic. I mostly designed short text based adventure games around if statements, but for my twelve year old mind it was both cool and fun. The most notable memory I have about BBX Basic is that line numbers are hard coded into the programs. This meant that every time I made a mistake I had to go back and change all the line numbers in my program to reflect the change. This has given me a real appreciation of modern languages.
The second language I learned was Quick Basic (QBasic). This language moved me away from goto syntax to gosub. It was also the first language with which I used graphics. It was one of the biggest senses of achievement discovering that I could move graphics around on the screen with QBasic at the age of 13. I realized that instead of calling circle(20, 20, 10), I could call circle(x, y, r) and move the circle by varying x and y. It of course seems obvious now, but I will never forget that moment.
The third language I learned was Perl. I learned Perl much later while in my senior year at high school. This was also the first language I used in a professional setting. I had interned with the company EC Power the summer before and Perl was one of the main languages they used for scripting. The following summer between my senior year of high school and freshmen year of college I wrote multiple Perl scripts for EC Power to translate between file formats.
In college I learned several more languages starting with C++ and matlab. C++ has become my favorite language to use in my programming. I learned the basics of it in Engineering 101, a required course for all engineering students at University of Michigan, but after that class ended I was still exploring and learning the ins and outs of the language. I have since used multiple libraries with C++ including allegro, SDL, and wxWidgets. I have also come to appreciate and fully embrace C++'s Object-Oriented nature.
After my freshman year of college I obtained a temporary summer job with the University of Michigan Medical School Information Services (MSIS) to convert reports from their old system to the BIRT reporting system. After completing the report conversions, I started working with PL/SQL to create email alerts and structure data within the Oracle database. I soon began learning Java (my second OO language) and working directly on a web application. First I added a component from another web application to display the BIRT reports directly from the space reporting application, but soon I was adding additional features and fixing bugs in multiple web applications. What started off as a summer job, turned into a 3 year employment. I enjoyed working with MSIS. Permanent employment was discussed when I graduated; however, I decided I was going to be leaving Ann Arbor and moving to Boston. I continued working with MSIS right up until the day before I moved.
Engineering Background:I decided that I wanted to major in aerospace engineering at a very young age. I have always been fascinated by space, and I wanted to work on the ships we used to send astronaut into space.
For my last two years of high school, I went to the Texas Academy of Mathematics and Science at the University of North Texas. This was a program dedicated to molding the next generation of engineers. Through this program I began taking college courses in my Junior year of high school and completed Calculus 3 and Linear Algebra by the end of my senior year. This program definitely helped propel me to the University of Michigan.
I completed a four year degree program at the University of Michigan, and enjoyed my time there tremendously. My favorite classes were Senior Design and Aero Lab II. I really enjoyed the team dynamics and project oriented work of these courses. Working on a project felt much more like engineering work than the homework given to me in most courses.
In my aerospace lab class, I worked with a team of colleagues to identify areas of turbulent flow on the Formula SAE vehicle, and suggested improvements. We created a scale model of the vehicle and tested it in the university's large wind tunnel to measure forces and moments of the vehicle. We also attached several ribbons to visualize the wind flow around the vehicle in racing conditions.
My senior design class looked at the challenges of sending a taxi-like vehicle to the moon and other locations within the solar system. I worked on the command and data handling system that would go into the hypothetical spacecraft. My class won 3rd place nationally in the Exploration Systems Mission Directorate (ESMD) Space Grant Project 2010 Systems Engineering Paper Competition held by NASA. I was invited by NASA to see the launch of STS-133 in VIP seating for this accomplishment. Unfortunately the shuttle was pushed back in November when I was in Florida, but, assuming the shuttle still launches in February, I still plan to see Discovery take off.