My three favorite places to shop online would be Amazon, Newegg, and eBay. Thee companies are the focus of of online shopping and unlike other businesses, there isn't a store that you can visit that is the "eBay store" in person, same with amazon, and Newegg, they only have websites. With all effort being pushed towards online shopping, they can focus on making shopping easier for the average person where you don't need to be a tech wiz to understand how to pay online. Amazon has its perks because of their fast shipping and wide array of merchandise from car parts, deodorant, to milk. One has the comfort of not needing to leave the house to get groceries and basic utilities which today during Covid-19 is a selling point. Newegg has the largest stock of computer hardware with shipping that can match Amazon and with them not having an in person store, their main goal is to make shopping online easier from support, returns, and exchanges, it's all doable. eBay has seen a major change in the past 10 years from being a site like craigslist to a site where major retailers and sellers sell goods at competitive prices.

Growing up in a suburban town on Long Island, many might say it’s their dream, but for my family this was not the case. My dad having a degree from Pakistan did not mean much and money was always an issue in the house. My two brothers and I learned to cope with it, we split up field trips, saved our money, and sold amazon fire sticks that we managed to jailbreak to our community in an effort to get more income into the house. With the money we were able to participate in school events and finally afford birthday presents to our parents and not just a card. During the process of selling these firesticks to our teachers and community showed me that an idea is worth investing in if there is dedication towards it. Companies like AirBnb, Zoom, and Amazon showcase these exact situations of an idea being invested into to help improve the quality of life, these are one of my main motivations when going through obstacles like I had in my youth.

The greatest achievement I’ve had was programming a code to output a password depending on the user’s choice. Although it may seem like a simple code to most experienced programmers, this program reminds me that it can be done with dedication and effort. Many people majoring in computer science have imposter syndrome, the idea that they don’t belong in a certain field since there are more qualified or experienced people, and with computer science, there may be students who have had previous experience with programming and does affect a novice or new programmer because they don’t feel as if they can do the same thing as them. This program that myself and another freshman in my class has taught us both that we don’t have to feel like imposters and we can still execute programs to not only improve quality of life, but to expand our knowledge on programming. As a freshman in college, I look back at this program we built for a hackathon programming fair in my first few weeks in college, and I still continue to think about this program when I have to encounter a challenging obstacle. Our program did not win, however constructing the program itself has allowed us to think more like programmers and have a better understanding of the fundamentals. Looking back at this, it teaches me that I do have a future and I should not throw it away, but to commit to these challenges so I can one day work or lead a tech start up such as Zoom, TikTok, Air-Bnb, etc.