When I was a freshman in high school, an online friend helped me realize that no, smacking my laptop didn’t fix any of the issues it had and that maybe I shouldn’t have torrented games from a shady website calling itself the bay for Pirates. He’d also started college when we met and showed me some of the code he’d written on Jgrasp for his assignments. That and the video of the spinning donut on Youtube caught my attention to programming and decided then that Computer Science would be my major after graduating high school. Whatever passion had been ignited back then more or less devolved into configuring my mod lists for Skyrim, Oblivion, and Fallout 3/NV, followed by an addiction to Steam Sales and Gacha microtransactions.
During my sophomore year at Leeward Community College, I saved enough from my part-time job, upgrading from my ASUS ROG STRIX GL502VT laptop to a CyberPowerPC desktop fitted with an Intel i5-9600KF, Nvidia GTX 1660 Super, 16GB of Ram, and a measly .2TB of SSD and 1TB of HDD space. The power difference between each machine felt so immense at the time as I could finally run newer games without overheating. Later on, when I decided to switch out the GPU with a RTX 3060, I got more interested in how the internals of my machine were manufactured. At that time though, I still took life for granted and just flowed with my classes, passing with the bare minimum.
I excused myself from putting in more thought into which avenue of Computer Science I’d focus on because it is broad and every job needs a tech guy these days. Sitting in a classroom with more accomplished individuals has shown me that I not only lack determination and tenacity, but I haven’t even set the bar high for myself. So when looking at my past Programming is what piqued my curiosity, that I somehow enjoyed spending countless hours configuring settings, testing, and debugging software, and I am interested in the intricaces of the hardware that allows me to work/study and keep myself entertained.
In the end, I find solace realizing that having gone with the flow till now was necessary for my own development. Maybe not knowing where exactly I want to find myself is okay as well, because being empty and without ambition lets me take in new information freely. I’ve just barely scratched the surface, especially because there are a plethora of ICS and other classes I still need to take in order to graduate. Originally, I just wanted to play games and be tied down to a cushy office job, which would be a boring and pitiful existence. There’s so many things to experience both in this field of study and in life and with that in mind, I want to experience the endless possibilities.