[11-15] I come from a middle class family, and I’m an only child. My father went to vocational school for construction, sprinkler fitting, and that was the maximum amount of education he had. My mother went to college. She’s a nurse, and she recently got her master’s. I have a big family; I have some people who have gone to college and some people who haven’t.
[101-112] My parents never really told me what to do. They were always kind of in the mindset of, “Do what you want, do what makes you happy, we’ll support you.” Whatever I decide is fine, so I never really had a reason to go anywhere because of them. I think from the beginning, my mind was pretty set on a science field so it didn’t take a lot of encouragement to pursue that.
[19-24] When I was in middle school, I changed my desires to reflect more programming and computer based design, I was looking at game design and stuff like that. It wasn’t until I got in high school and I started taking the programming courses that I decided to go to computer science. And then when it came down to time to choose my major, I had gotten sick of the programming but I still liked the problem solving and working hands on.
[101-112] One big influence that I did have was my cousin. The way high school in my district worked was when you pick your classes for your freshman year of high school, you decide whether or not you want to go to the vocational school half day and then, after that first year, you can decide to go full day or still half day. My cousin, who is three or four years older than me, went to the same district I did. He went to the vocational school for computer design. He originally wanted to be a roller coaster engineer and I remember growing up and seeing all the things he was doing and I was like, “That’s really cool.”
[115-121] So, he was definitely one of the people who got me interested in the computer aided part of engineering, and he’s definitely the one who I think got me really interested in the design aspect and kept me centralized around that area. But otherwise, it wasn’t really people telling me to go here or go there. I had this idea from the get go and people would kind of just positively reinforce. If they asked what I wanted to do, I’d say engineering or computer science and they’d be like, “That’s a good profession.” Or, “I think you’d succeed there.” Or something like that.