By now it was the spring and scholarship deadlines were around the corner.Īfter that I spent almost all of my free time search for and applying for any and every scholarship I remotely qualified for. Thankfully, my counselor taught me about scholarships and a bit about financial aid. My dad is an army veteran, so he was able to help me use some of his disability benefits and that helped take a bit of the stress off. We couldn't afford to keep people alive, so where would we get the money for college? The level of absolute emptiness I felt when I first saw how much college cost almost made me give up immediately. You just put in your application, get accepted, and go. Until I talked to a guidance counselor, I thought college was just what happened after high school if you wanted to stay in school longer. I knew you had to apply, but I didn't know you had to pay. I didn't start talking to anyone at school about college until maybe the beginning of senior year of high school. There was so much I didn't know about college. The car behind it all, a 1977 Chevy Monte Carlo College Time While it was fun, I still went off to college determined to be the best mechanical engineer, and to go design awesome cars because cars were one of the best parts of my childhood. It was amazing getting hardware to respond to my commands from a computer. Then I joined a robotics club in high school and that's where I got my first whiff of code. To be honest, I didn't fully understand what an engineer did until I was almost done with college.įrom the reading I had done, I just saw you needed to be good at math and science and I loved those things already so it made sense for me to keep going. I think my mom thought I was going to drive trains for a while. I learned that engineers make a lot of money, so I doubled down on my decision.Īt that point, no one in my family had been to college and nobody knew what an engineer actually did. At the time I kind of thought it was because we didn't have enough money. Keep in mind that, by now, my mom was about 87 years old. The immediate family I grew up around was largely elderly people. I was probably about 13 at the time and things at home were becoming more hectic. That's when I made up my mind to become a mechanical engineer. Luckily someone saw me doing that and they starting talking about engineering and that they get to design stuff like that. Then I'd try to do some math behind them to see if I could build a prototype out of the junk we had around. That didn't seem like a real job at the time, so I satiated that desire by drawing pictures of concepts I thought were cool. I still wanted to do something with cars because of how much I enjoyed working on them so I picked the next best thing: designing the cars that mechanics get to work on! To this day I still don't understand why mom thought working with electricity was better than working on cars, but she never yielded on that issue. Eventually I got good enough to do minor plumbing and electrical work with a lot of tinkering and a lot of luck. I'd go back in and start thinking of other stuff I could work on inside of the house. There were times I would try to sneak out and work with him, but he knew it would only make my mom mad, so he'd send me back inside. That kind of crushed my little hopes and dreams of becoming a mechanic. But my mom didn't want me to because I was a girl. It stopped working eventually and I tried to go back out and help my grandpa with cars. I took it everywhere, playing whatever games were on it. It was a little VTech laptop and I loved that thing. There was one birthday present I remember as my first exposure to anything tech-related. But with my mom and grandma shielding me from a large amount of that craziness, I was able to pretend to escape into my love for math and experiments. My family was all over the place and it wasn't the most stable environment. I grew up with my great-grandma, who is the mom I refer to throughout this. I think it was mainly to keep me distracted from a lot of the chaos around me. Whether it was volunteering in the community, reading books from the library, or doing homework for "fun", they always had me focused on learning. We didn't have money, so they always kept me busy with something. But my mom and grandma had different plans. And I thought one day I'd grow up to be a mechanic like him. I used to help my grandpa work on cars in the summer when I was growing up. But somehow I ended up building software. There aren't many people out there who grew up dreaming of writing code.
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