Wesley Schmidt Email & Phone Number

My name is Wesley Schmidt, I was born and raised in Louisiana and have always showed an interest toward technology and how to use it creatively. From an early age, I’ve had a fleeting attention span, nothing really caught my interest too much until someone made the mistake of handing me a controller to an old Nintendo Entertainment System. I was hooked, it was all I could think about and the source of the many questions that lead me to my discovery of software engineering and how it blends so perfectly with the world of art. First, I focused on the artistic aspect of what I hoped to one day be my future, arrow-heading the introduction of AP-Art classes at Holy Cross high-school, and became one of the first students to be enrolled. Next I enrolled at Louisiana State University to graduate with a degree in digital art. There I learned of the core pillars of 2D design, color theory, composition, 3D modeling, animation, and even took a game design course where I created all of the art assets with a small team of programmers. It was in this class where my interest in coding languages became an obsession, I needed to know how they work. My uncle was a big influence on my understanding of what it meant to be a software engineer, because he seems to do a bit of everything. This included monitoring nuclear reactors to relate correlating data, working with embedded firmware in electric meters, and creating automated announcements akin to train boarding/leaving etc. He really got my foot in the door, but it would be my sister who would push me to pursue this new path. At the time, she was still enrolled in the University of New Orleans when she suggested I do the same, so I did. I took an intro the Java to start with, this served to solidify the fact that I knew that this is what I wanted to do. Taking that class I learned that, as a programmer, I have many different ways of approaching a solution, if something wasn’t making sense, I could always try a different way. This flexibility combined with the natural puzzle-solving nature of the work has lead me along the path that I still walk today.