Undergraduate / Most students have an identity, an interest or a talent that defines them in an essential way... [2]

Recommended 350-500 words, no more than 650
Most students have an identity, an interest or a talent that defines them in an essential way. Tell us about yourself.

I've loved computers since I was first able to use them. My early interest focused mainly on Space Cadet Pinball and online flash games, but over the years I've grown more and more interested in what exactly is going on inside that box under my desk. My curiosity started out by playing with some code in Javascript for Minecraft: just changing some values here and there, and watching what happened. Eventually, that evolved into looking at online tutorials and low level computer science courses to get a better understanding of what I was really doing. From there, I moved onto making a game from scratch in Unity during a game design class in school. Every step of the way, I loved the feeling of accomplishment that came from getting my work to run properly, and I found myself always wanting to know more so I could get to that point as quickly as possible.

I started getting more interested in the hardware side of computers during my junior year. My PC was getting a bit old for my purposes, no longer able to play the latest games, and I decided I would build a new one to get the most out of my money. I spent weeks researching parts, learning what each one does and how different models would affect my overall build. I decided what architectures my CPU and GPU would be, what chipset I needed (although I didn't fully understand what either of those things meant), made a list of all the parts I would get, and broke out the money I had saved up from my job to order them. The week I waited while my parts came in a few at a time felt like a month. Finally, the last ones arrived and I could begin putting them together. I began painstakingly putting the RAM sticks into the proper slots, screwing the motherboard into the case, panicking a little when one of the pins on the CPU was bent (luckily, it was a nonessential one, or else I would have been looking at a $200 piece of scrap metal). Then, I moved on to the CPU cooler, one of the parts I was able to salvage from my old computer.

I read the instructions for how to attach it, went to put it on, and...it didn't fit. I was crushed. It turns out it wasn't a standard size, so there was no way to it work, and it would have taken days to get a new one shipped. So, I started calling every store in my area that might have had one. On about the tenth try, I found one, but it was over an hour away. I considered just leaving it for a few days, but I decided that one way or another, I was going to finish it that day. When I got home, I didn't stop working on it until I was able to breathe a sigh of relief and satisfaction as it turned on. That experience gave me an amazingly deeper understanding of computer hardware. I found out things from what all the noises my PC makes and the little lights on it mean to why it turns on when I press the power button. And what happens inside that box is no longer a complete mystery to me.

The more I think about it, the more I realize how incredibly little I still know about computers, but there's nothing I would rather have that opportunity to learn about. I still have yet to find a subject that fuels my curiosity as much as understanding what's behind those same games I used to play as a little kid.