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Dreams, Reality, and Code

June 2, 2015

To be honest, I never would have thought I would be walking down this path. Since I was very young, I’ve always been fascinated by animation. Storytelling and designing filled my head as a kid. I practiced drawing in my free time, so I could one day become a great animator working in the film or TV industry. Now, I’ve been shipped off to college. Not an art school, but a technical school.

So, you might wonder what happened to change my mind. Well, even though it may be sad, I feel obligated to unveil the mystery regardless. At one point, I was researching the animation industry. I was investigating how a person could best navigate themselves into a solid career in the field. The more I read, the more I realized how unprepared I was. I found that the majority of the animation businesses were in California. Most of the major art schools take in hundreds of artists, who were probably much more skilled than me. In a moment, I saw hundreds of obstacles piling on top of each other, in between me and my dream. I felt that I would be foolish to pursue my aspiration to become an artist.

Even though this goes against every incline in our fight-for-your-dream society, sometimes reality sets in. For me, to throw my whole life and risk it all to fulfill this one career choice, while brave and adventurous, would be unwise and close-minded. Around the time of abandoning my dream of animation, a new interest ignited inside of me. Programming.

It wasn’t just that I typed in a bunch of symbols and the computer did something. It wasn’t just making some neat little number guessing game. It was something new and different than anything I encountered before. I thought of what I wanted to do; a problem I wanted to solve. Then, I would busily conceive of the process of how I could accomplish this. Finally, I would work, code, debug, and repeat, until the masterpiece was finished. I wasn’t just getting the computer to “talk”. I was translating concepts, processes, ideas, methods, solutions, objects, etc. into a tangible, user-friendly application. I would create my own algorithms, processes, and sequences to logically meet a goal. This wasn’t just solving math problems, this was using applied mathematics and logic. To me, programming was where objective sciences became subjective. Or, how I often describe it: creative math.