How I ended up in Lincoln, Nebraska

If you were to ask me to perform bubble sort on an array five years ago, then I would’ve ignored you. If you were to ask me to explain what a linked list is, I would’ve told you to stop talking to me. If you were to ask me what the time complexity of Dijkstra’s algorithm is, I surely would’ve kneecapped you.

Why? Because the only thing that I cared about was basketball. It was my dream, for as long as I could remember, to play professional basketball. I didn’t know nor care about 1’s and 0’s — that was for the Smart People and I simply, well I wasn’t one of them. Little did I know, my dream of playing professional basketball would be crushed through no fault but my own… I was kicked off my high school basketball team for making an inappropriate joke about the head varsity coach’s wife and to my luck, they both found out. I was immediately kicked off the team; during our conversation, he told me that I would never be playing basketball for his program again. My solution was to transfer to a different school but I wasn’t accepted anywhere else. That was the end of my childhood fantasy.

With basketball out of the picture, I had to find a different passion. For the next year or so I became the quintessence of a high-school stoner; I didn’t do much. However, I did discover Fallout 4 and began playing it religiously for a while. I did well in school but then again it was just high school, not a whole lot of effort was required. As for my life plan — I didn’t have one. I didn’t need one. I was comfortable with getting high and playing video games — it was an easy life, one I could get used to. Then one day, while sitting in my psychology class learning about schizophrenia; I decided I was going to become a psychiatrist to learn all about cognition, I thought the mind was an interesting enigma and I needed to understand it in its entirety.

I decided to bring this up with my family and hear what they had to say… well, to summarize what happened next: the idea was shot down faster than a Soviet spy plane flying over the White House. Now, with all due respect to psychologists — I think it is a fascinating and necessary profession, but you have to consider that both of my parents are electrical engineers, as well as my stepdad. So the social sciences just didn’t cut it and I was back to the drawing board.

Fast forward a year later. While sitting in my Algebra 3–4 class, a teacher from down the hall came in to talk about an event called “National Hour of Coding.”…