I have always enjoyed solving and contemplating problems of logic and reasoning. When I was younger, the cartoony mazes and riddles of restaurant kids’ menus were not enough for me. I wanted to experience the other side of the equation; I wanted to create problems and have others solve them. So my hours were spent creating mazes, word searches, and crossword puzzles for my family and friends. When I was 11, I got my hands on a scroll saw, and started a business on Etsy hand-cutting and selling wooden jigsaw puzzles. I frequently employed a trick my great-grandfather passed down to me: cutting straight into a corner, creating the appearance of two sharply angled edge pieces rather than a “corner piece,” rendering the orthodox method of arranging the edge pieces first that much trickier. And while I have since outgrown much of my interest in kids’ menu games and jigsaw puzzles, I have not outgrown the ethos that caused those interests; rather, it is my affinity toward problem-solving which has spurred my inclination toward computer science. The majority of my experience in computer science has arisen from the nine coding courses I have taken from Rice University, University of Michigan, University of Houston, and Letourneau University. I began taking coding in middle school and loved it; it required a combination of creativity and logic that fit my personality perfectly. By late middle school and early high school, coding had become my full-time hobby. I specialized in recreations of classic video games, often challenging my friends and family to beat them, as I had done with jigsaw and logic puzzles when I was younger. A recreation of asteroids, a four-player adaptation of pong, and a version of tic-tac-toe, in which players had to shoot balls onto the board, were among my proudest creations. More recently, I used Python to analyze JSON data on over 20,000 real games of The Resistance, a two-team game of the mafia/social deduction genre, and my personal favorite board game. I determined how often a team won when they employed certain strategies versus when they did not and used that knowledge to improve my own chances of winning. My enjoyment of projects like these in middle school and high school drove me to the realization that I wanted to pursue an education and a career in computer science. I intend to major and earn a four-year bachelor’s degree in computer science. And while I do not have an exhaustive plan for what I hope to do afterward, an IT internship and a mentor relationship which I pursued in high school have given me valuable insight into my potential career opportunities, and I hope to focus my career interests further during my time in college. I am sure that my natural bend toward logic and reasoning, my problem-solving ability, and the experiences I have had in high school, along with my college education, will point me down a promising career path in the ever-broadening field of computer science.

How many of our pets think they are humans? The way they greet us and love us unconditionally are amongst their best qualities. In this way, we should be more like our dogs. So, if you want a sip of my tea, I will share it with you, my beloved pet!