Why I decided to study Software Engineering

From a young age, I was always fascinated with computers. My family was lucky enough to have a desktop when dial up was just being introduced. As a child at the time, around fifth grade, I started dabbling in programming with BASIC. I loved being able to type in what I wanted done, and having the computer execute my commands.

Fast forward to high school. Still a giant nerd. Technology has evolved a lot, and there is now so much to learn in the ways of coding. My dad took an interest to web development, buying books on HTML and javascript. We spent a lot of our time learning what we could to make websites just look as cool as possible. That’s how I started really coding. And then my school offered computer programming as a class. I applied for that class as soon as I could, and as a junior in high school, I was learning C++ and java. I looked forward to that class even though we only met twice a week.

After graduation, I knew I wanted to continue with learning programming, but life always finds a way to throw curveballs. Maybe someday I will share with the world the struggles I faced, but for now I will just say that instead of college, I had to work full time. That didn’t phase me, really, because I had held a job continuously since the day I turned 14, and balanced work and school.

Now, 16 years after graduating high school, and finally being able to put all those struggles behind and focus on myself, I decided to pursue what I loved most my whole life. And that is software engineering. I’ve never looked forward to the future more than I do now.