Stanford students possess an intellectual vitality. Reflect on an idea or experience that has been important to your intellectual development.
For many people a problem is viewed as an obstacle but ever since i can remember I have rather seen it as a vehicle to greater knowledge. This is exactly where it all started, in my head as thought usually precedes action. I was a young boy with outstanding curiosity, but limitations; my father wouldn't let me use a computer. A Macbook Pro with wires spiralling in all directions sat on my fathers dinner table/office and made me drool, but it was inaccessible. Not that i did anything wrong but i felt as though i was disowned and banned to the mediocrity that was our archaic family computer running Windows 95 in the corner. I have latter come to know that it was the flashpoint for all things i was to know about computers. I lived with two teenage sisters during the advent of social networking and we were all supposed to share this "dream machine" until it broke down. I won't lie, it laid dormant for a while but unconsciously I latter came back to tackle the myriad of errors, pop-ups, BIOS failure and slow internet connection. Not only did fixing my computer give me a better workstation but it arroused some sort of euphoric pleasure and self satisfaction I still cannot understand until this day, but seek out always. It may seem weird but I now sub-conciously wish for all the computers around me to just break down, just to provide me another project to work on. Unfortunately this isn't the best things as some crashes are irrevocable so I went into 3D modelling and animation at 11. Having downloaded the 1000 plus dollars worth of software (illegaly, I was young and passionate) I began to model everything from Shrek, to dragons, to videogame characters. Not only was it cool to express my bubbling creativity but it gave me a mature sense of pride, not in that I believed I could design fantasy charcters for the next Harry Potter movie but that I had come to have a complete understanding of a complex software. A few years latter I've merged my passion for problem solving and creativity for design to pickup Java programming. I've come to a complete idolization of programming and furthermore to the possibilities it entails. As a young boy I was inquisitive as to how my father provided for my family using his computer, a few books and pure mind power, now I wonder, no I dream how i can multiply that by a factor of 10 and change the world. But I'm starting small. I find every programmer to be an autodidact and I humbly find myself to be apart of that mold. As a teen forty dollars is hard to come by, but when day i picked myself to commute from Brooklyn to theBarnes and Noble in lower Manhattan to pick up a book titled "Beginning Android Games." The first two-hundred pages, ohh I dreaded the first two hunderd pages. Here I was with this tome with thousands of lines of various words, characters, phrases and methods that could easily drive one mad, It was like learning a new language! Thus was my may joy and my frustration each and every day of reading this book. Its like, everyday I wanted to give up and thought there was no reason to stop at the same time. About 700 pages latter not only do I feel like I've done something extremely productive but I've tested the mettle of my mind and passed my own test. I know have my own app on the Android Market and feel like I've left a mark on the world. That is my ultimate goal, to make the world a better, more brilliant, more beautifull place on line of code at a time.
