When I was in elementary and middle school, like many other kids, I absolutely loved Minecraft. I still think it's a great game, but at that time it was something I played every day. As I was getting into middle school, my friends and I wanted to play together, and I ended up hosting some of our Minecraft servers for a few years. At first, I paid a company to host the server for me and all I had to do was install plugins and make sure to restart the server occasionally.

However, as time went on, I realized I could host the server myself on an old PC I had, which would give me more control and save me money. Once I made this transition, the enchanced sense of ownership and control motivated me to mold my server into something that I was proud of. I began to not only install plugins, but modify their underlying functionality to give my server a unique experince. I took feedback from users, and eventually had robust featuresets that were not found on other servers. This caused the community to grow past my small initial friend group, and at points I had dozens of players on the server. This gave me a real sense of reasponsibiltiy, as I now had to schedule my maintinence and new feature releases, as people wanted to know when they could play.

Once I was in high school, I took AP CSA and learned more about computer science was and how broad the field was. From then on, I knew I wanted to study CS and I applied to all of my prospective colleges as a CS major.