Nathan Rolfes

Background

About Nathan Rolfes

I am a junior at the University of Cincinnati pursuing a Bachelor of Computer Engineering. I have a passion for lower-level programming, hardware design, and combining the two to make working projects.I have maintained this passion since when I was in middle school where I enjoyed working on simple robotics projects where we used a proprietary language to control motors and buttons. Further into high school, where I attended my local community college to take classes, I participated in the college's robotic club. At this club, we worked to build a robotic catapult tank. I also got more experience with programming logic, working with languages such as C, Visual C#, and Python. Outside of these technical classes, I also earned two associate degrees alongside my high school honors diploma. More recently, I participated in University of Cincinnati's largest hackathon, where my team learned Arduino and Arduino programming by making a functional word unscramble game using an Arduino, LCD display, and a numeric keypad for input. This project won 6th place even though none of our group members had any prior experience with microcontrollers.From this hackathon, I gained a better idea of what I would like to continue working on in the future. I also gained valuable experience being the leader on a collaborative project. I tend to gravitate towards being a group leader, as I have discovered from this hackathon, my classes, and even my prior job in the fast food industry. My other interests include video games, ping pong, and disc golf. I also enjoy working out, and I'm part of the club dodgeball team on campus. I am eager to learn and apply concepts like embedded systems, computer architecture, FPGA design, and more as I continue my education at the University of Cincinnati.