Patrick Gaines — Outstanding Undergraduate

Patrick Gaines

Patrick Gaines
B.S. in Computer Science
Graduated from Kapaun Mt. Carmel High School in Wichita, Kansas

While serving in the United States Marine Corps as an electronics maintenance technician Patrick Gaines’ mind would drift toward thoughts of studying computer science in a university setting. “I enjoy the infinite creativity that is possible with computers,” said Gaines.

After five years in the Marine Corps, Gaines joined the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering at Arizona State University. He served as president of the Software Developers Association (SoDA) where he helped to organize the first annual Coding Competition. As a student in the Fulton Undergraduate Research Initiative (FURI) he designed an Android mobile application interface for MATLAB, a high-performance language for technical computing.

As a junior, Gaines had the unique distinction of earning a $10,000 Google Student Veterans of America (SVA) scholarship.

He also served as President of the Student Veterans Association on ASU’s Tempe campus in which he upgraded the organization’s mission and branding to better fit the rapidly changing campus culture and to offer professional development opportunities for veterans advocacy work.

As a senior, Gaines also helped to found the Fulton Student Veterans Organization. He will continue as president of the student organization for the next year while he completes a master’s degree in computer science through the 4+1 accelerated program.

After getting his master’s degree, Gaines wants to follow his dream of working in programming.

“I have always wanted to be a programmer,” he said.

Gaines is also passionate about using engineering to make mathematics more useful in the real world.

Someday he hopes to design his own programming language that is both a natural spoken language and can also be interpreted by machines. “This language will use mathematical concepts as the native means of expressing ideas,” he said.

“The intended result would be to design a computing architecture that inherently makes it easier for a programmer to write more secure and better performing code,” said Gaines.