The first time I heard about CECS, I thought, “Wait… you’re allowed to study both?”
Because for most of my life, I felt split between two versions of myself, the one who loved the physical side of electronics and the one who loved the abstract world of code. CECS was the first time I didn’t have to choose.
It felt like everything finally lined up a little.
I am the person who can’t walk away from a problem until I understand what is going on underneath it. If the hardware glitched, I wanted to know why. If the software broke, I wanted to know what the hardware was doing when it happened. I didn’t see those as separate interests, just two sides of the same curiosity.
CECS made that feel normal instead of confusing.
Once I started taking classes, it surprised me how much the hardware and software actually depend on each other. One day I’d be debugging a timing issue on a microcontroller, and the next I’d be writing code that suddenly explained exactly why that timing mattered. Everything connected in ways I didn’t expect, and weirdly, that made the chaos kind of fun.
And USC made it all feel real.
Winning my first USC AI hackathon happened because my team decided to try something slightly unhinged… and it worked. Starting Launch AI happened because I wanted a space for people who are curious about AI but don’t know where to begin, and USC is the kind of place where you can build that community from scratch.
None of those things were part of a long-term plan. They just grew out of moments where I followed something I genuinely cared about.
CECS works like that too. Some days the hardware listens to you, other days it acts like it’s on strike. Some days the code runs perfectly, other days it breaks for reasons no human being will ever understand. But when things finally come together, even if it’s something tiny, it feels genuinely rewarding.
That’s the part of CECS I didn’t expect to love: the small wins that hit harder than they should.
If I had to describe the major, I’d say it’s for people who like being in the middle of how things work, not just at the top layer or the bottom one. It’s for people who ask questions even when the assignment technically didn’t ask for them. It’s for people who learn by building, breaking things, fixing them, and accidentally learning ten more things along the way.
In the end, CECS feels like the only major that didn’t make me pick a version of myself.
It just let me be all of them.
And that’s why I’m here.
