[Student Profile]
[Prompt & Essay]
“What do you want to be when you grow up?” I remember my uncle asking me when I was 7
years old. For years, I had no real answer--or I should say that my answers kept changing. And
the fact that my sense of stability was tested multiple times in my life made it even harder to
decide.
I was a first-generation American, but my family had to move to India for four years and moved back again just when I had found my footing. My ambitions wavered as I went through changing life circumstances. I wanted to be a doctor like the one who stitched up my brother’s bleeding forehead from an accident. When a relentless downpour on the fateful day of Dec 1, 2015 flooded and submerged the city of Chennai where we were living, I wanted to be a meteorologist who can foresee catastrophes and save lives. When I saw the poverty in the streets of India, I wanted to become a political leader who can eliminate corruption and hunger.
Simply put, I was a dreamer with no clear vision of the future. I kept telling myself that I would find my passion in life at the right time.
That time came on a lazy Sunday morning when I was sitting next to my dad as he was doing computer programming for his job. A sneak peek at his computer screen revealed the code he had written, which looked to me like incomprehensible gibberish. Inquisitively, I asked him how he could do this seemingly impossible thing for a living. With a chuckle, he taught me a simple “Hello World” program, followed by another program that did arithmetic operations.
I was intrigued and felt as if a new door had just opened. From then on, I rejoiced in learning everything about computers: how data is represented in bits and bytes; how compilers and interpreters process instructions; the myriad of data structures and algorithms; and the wonderful world of object-oriented programming. I realized how amazing it is to speak to the computer in a language that it understands, and then watch as it performs exactly what it was told to do--in a flash! I loved this communication so much that I started conversing with my computer whenever I was coding. As someone who had learned two new languages in four years when I was in India, I could appreciate that computational languages are no different from human languages; they both have their own semantics, syntaxes, and nuances.
With this realization, learning new programming languages was no longer difficult. In a short period of time, I developed a chat application, an object-recognition application, and a few games. I keep myself updated on the latest trends in technology by following industry social media accounts, attending virtual conferences from industry leaders and learning from thought leaders through industry publications. The more I learn, the more I am amazed by how computer science has positively impacted every aspect of society. I strongly believe that by pursuing computer science as my profession, I can make every one of my childhood dreams come true. I can build a telemedicine platform that connects patients with medical experts, develop a social platform that creates awareness and helps society, and apply data science and prediction techniques to forecast natural disasters. I am incredibly excited by the opportunities ahead of me!
I now have an answer to the question that my uncle had asked me years ago--I am going to be a computer technologist who pursues solving the unsolvable. I have found my passion, and hope to achieve something through technology that makes a positive impact on this planet. But before starting that long journey, I made sure to call my uncle to give him an answer to his question--a long-delayed answer, for sure, but one that was delivered with enthusiasm and conviction.
[644 words]