University of Minnesota Athletics
Taiye Bello Learns the Language of Computers
11/12/2017 12:00:00 AM | Women's Basketball
Taiye Bello (Southfield, Mich.) started 14 games as a freshman last season, including the last 10 in a row. She was named the Golden Gophers' Most Improved Player at the team's annual banquet. Head coach Marlene Stollings expects Bello, who can play the 4 or 5 position, to be a contributor again as Minnesota begins the 2017-18 season.
Off the court, Bello has settled into a major that has interested her since a high school job search.
Before she got serious about basketball, Taiye Bello spent a lot of time playing computer games. Whether it was Roblox or some other online game, it was common to find her and her sister Kehinde in front of a screen. Bello is now getting a new perspective on technology in her area of study at the University of Minneosta. The sophomore forward has decided on computer science as her major.
Bello started looking deeper into the world of computers during high school. Hoping to make a little spending money, but busy with basketball and homework, she wanted to find a job with a flexible time commitment. One option she considered was designing websites for small businesses.
At that time, Bello did not have the programming experience needed to carry out that idea. She is now gaining those skills through her class work. Bello is taking an introductory computing course during the fall semester, which includes learning Python programming language. The projects and labs have held Bello's interest.
"It's pretty interactive," she said. "That's what I really like about it."
Computer science is a field that is constantly changing and challenging its students and workforce to keep up. On top of that, some of Bello's classmates started programming at a younger age.
"It's kind of overwhelming," she said. "Even though it's an intro class, there's a lot being thrown at you, especially if you don't have prior experience in programming or computing in general. It can be
challenging at times to not get ahead of yourself, and just go at your own pace."
Playing basketball in the Big Ten, Bello is used to handling some pressure. Even though her chosen path of studies can be difficult, she knows it's what she wants to do.
"It's challenging but at the same time it's fun, so I like it," Bello said.
Back in her Roblox-playing days, Bello probably never imagined calculus, physics and statistics had anything to do with computers. But those are all classes she is taking or will take in the near future for her major. Her high school self just discovering web design probably never thought she would be working on genetic algorithms. But that's something she's doing in class this fall, in addition to learning languages like HTML and CSS.
Bello is excited by the wide range of subjects and capabilities involved with computer science. She doesn't yet know what career path she would like to take, but she's looking forward to developing websites as her programming skills continue to advance.
"A lot goes into it, really," Bello said. "It's not just the programming. It's also planning and figuring out what layout looks right. If you think about it, to make a website, you might have a team of marketers who have experience in knowing how to draw people to a website. And then you have people developing and people designing. All the expertise that goes into creating and maintaining a website is kind of cool. When you think about websites like Amazon, the amount of data they have to have stored, and they need to have a programming system and things like that, that's pretty cool."
