2014 Fellow Interview: Matt

The following interview was originally published in the HackNY FieldGuide for the tenth hackNY hackathon where hackNY celebrated the graduation of its fifth class of hackNY Fellows. Kyle Ryan '14, interviewed a selection of fellows during the summer to discuss what made them tick.Want to become a hackNY fellow this summer? Checkout apply.hackny.org.Matt Condon goes to Louisiana Tech and worked at Magnetic in Chelsea as their hackNY fellow.Where'd you grow up?I grew up in Louisiana. I had a few struggles growing up. Most of my time was spent around Louisiana area. I went to Louisiana tech mostly because it was free for me. Up until now, I was an EE and Physics major. But now after doing hackNY, I'm going to switch to being a CS major.What's your biggest struggle right now?Time is really a struggle. I think we all have felt that. There's so many possible routes I could go on. I just want to do 'everything' but know that I can only do one or two of those things with the time I have. It reminds me of the proverbial triangle between Friends, Academics and Family.What advice would you give the person you were 4 years ago?Mostly, I just stopped worrying. I spent most of my high school worrying about failure or about getting good grades. Once I stopped worrying and caring about what other people thought of me, I was free to do the things I'm doing now.Where do you see yourself 4 years from now?I'll probably figure out how to take a quarter off of school to work at a place like Digital Ocean. I'd want to do an internship every winter quarter until I graduate. That way I am able to get experience while still going to school.Everything I've done, and even though this sounds crazy, points to building an exoskeleton suit like Iron Man. It's the perfect combination of everything I love '96 electrical engineering, computer science and physics. If i'm able to be involved in something like that, I would extremely enjoy it.