About
I'm John Jacobson, though most people call me Jack. I'm an engineering student in the Grainger College of Engineering at the University of Illinois, focused on electrical engineering.
I've always chased curiosity, the need to figure out how things work, but the one thing I could never quite understand was electricity. Tiny, invisible electrons that light up the world, power our computers, and drive everything around us. Trying to understand it led me to build my own computer in middle school, and computers for my friends. It led me to my first CS class, to Arduinos, and to studying the physics of electricity and magnetism.
What I love about electrical engineering is its almost magical nature. It lets you build what should be impossible, solving physical and software limitations at once to arrive at something compact and elegant that makes life better. To me, a device that can hold and display human knowledge is genuinely otherworldly.
What I am studying
I started at Illinois in August 2025 and expect to finish in 2029. The coursework that has mattered most so far is ECE 120 and ECE 220, which took me from logic gates and Karnaugh maps through C and LC-3 assembly, alongside ECE 110, electromagnetism in PHYS 212, differential equations, and discrete mathematics.
Most of what I know about C++ has come from building things outside of class and working through learncpp.com, rather than from a course.
What I want to build
I want to keep chasing that curiosity into building the kind of products I grew up admiring, the ones that are elegant and compact and woven so deeply into daily life that people forget how much engineering sits behind them.
In practice that means embedded systems and firmware, or FPGA and ASIC design. I am looking for an internship in that direction.
Outside of class
I earned Eagle Scout in December 2024. My service project built planter benches with built in catnip planters for the Forsyth County Humane Society, which meant sourcing materials, managing a budget, and directing a team of more than thirty volunteers. I also served as my troop's Senior Patrol Leader.
At Illinois I am rush chair for Phi Gamma Delta, where I run recruitment and organise the events around it. I am also a member of the IEEE student chapter and SIGARCH, and the workshops there on soldering, circuit design, and ASIC design have been some of the more useful hours I have spent outside a classroom.
Away from all of that I run Arch Linux with Hyprland because I enjoy the tinkering more than I need the desktop to be finished. I write C++ for fun, including a Pong clone in raylib, and I model things in Blender and Onshape. I hike, I travel when I get the chance, and I have a four year student season ticket for Illinois football.
