Hello everyone,

My name is Michael Trageser. I am a sophomore at Penn State majoring in Industrial Engineering. I am from 25 minutes north of Pittsburgh. My hobbies include doing fun things outside like hiking, kayaking, and snowboarding. I also like to go to the gym and watch my Pittsburgh sports teams, although watching the Pirates this year has been brutal! My interests in technology stemmed from playing at first desktop computer games on my family's old “dinosaur” computer. This then morphed into console video games. Every fall I use data from fantasy football to help me draft my winning team. I like how something as simple as fantasy football can be broken down and improved through statistics and technology. I primarily use technology to help me complete tasks in life that would otherwise be unnecessarily difficult. I choose to study engineering out of high school because I have always enjoyed being able to work on real world applications and I like the idea that when I have a job after college, my work will be bettering society as a whole.

I would say that my experience in an IT environment is limited as this is my first IT class at Penn State. Much of my coursework is heavy on physics and various math courses. This summer I was working as an intern for a machine health monitoring company based out of State College called KCF Technologies. My goal for this course is to gain some more exposure with different platforms within the vast world of tech. Hopefully I can take some things I will learn into my engineering courses as well as working in a technical setting later on. I would like to build myself as a well rounded engineer who can help solve a variety of problems.

My coding experience is quite limited (only one class back in early high school). I know that the future is online and being able to code would be a great asset for me to add to my tools I can use as an engineer to solve problems. My goal is not to become an IT professional because I know that is not where my strengths lie. I would rather use technical knowledge of technology to help me relate to others who are IT professionals. If I am able to “talk the talk” when conversing with those who are more technical than me, I know it would be a great advantage compared to being left in the dust.

My interest in Industrial Engineering specifically deals with how the field focuses on optimizing processes and solving problems on a large scale. I enjoy looking at “big picture” issues and how in many industries, everything relates to each other. I hope to use my voice and communication skills to share my work and help a team accomplish great things.

This blog will include weekly posts such as this on topics within technology. The blog will function as a way for me to share my work with the world while practicing using different platforms along the way! In this week's post I have included a video comparing SQL and NoSQL. I will discuss functionality and compare their applications.

Enjoy and welcome to the blog!