I knew I wanted to make video games for a living ever since I first learned how to code in my elementary school computer lab. I ventured through middle and high school with this same mindset, spending my free time making simple games on the Scratch website, then later moving onto projects with JavaScript, C#, and the Unity game engine. Each project I made was an expression of art as much as it was an exercise in problem-solving and I knew I could do this every day for the rest of my life. A computer science degree was my obligatory ticket into the world of computing so I could make my game-designing dreams come true. My career path took a turn during my senior year of high school. To fill out my high school’s required community service hour benchmark in the most tolerable way I could find, I begrudgingly gave up four hours of my precious free time each week to volunteer at the tutoring center at my school. However, the experience ended up being much more than tolerable. Helping other students learn how to program filled me with a satisfaction that I never felt before, and I realized that I loved teaching computer science even more than I loved coding. I left the world of video game development behind (visiting now and then for hobby projects) and I started pursuing a career in education full throttle. My experiences as an instructor at a STEM summer camp and as an undergraduate teaching assistant at my university have further affirmed that this is the right career for me. My dream job now is to be a professor of computer science. I daydream about writing lesson plans, thinking about how I would lead the classes that I take. I find the motivation to study not just enough to pass, but to become an expert on each topic so that I could teach the course one day. I pick the seats in the front and chat with my professors, looking for guidance as they show me the paths they took to get to where they stand today. I know I am the best candidate for this scholarship because of how your support would not just help me, but my community as well. With this financial support, it will be more feasible for me to work on research over the summer instead of pursuing a more lucrative summer job. My research proposal involves working with my professor to develop a free, online educational game for teaching digital logic systems as a resource to students at the university and across the internet. The financial support will also let me think about my future, putting away the money from my teaching assistant position to save for graduate school instead of using it for my current tuition. This support will help make my dream of teaching at the university level a reality, allowing me to lead the next generation of software engineers.

My computer science goals are the same as they have been since the first time I set out to try coding in my elementary school computer lab: always keep learning and always keep making. At the start, I played with simple block-based code, making small games for me and my friends to play. As my knowledge deepened and I started to learn real programming languages, these two goals have led me to seek challenges I had never thought I could complete before. My goals guided me to attend a STEM-focussed magnet school, participate in a six-week summer computer programming internship at my local university, publish programming projects online, build community with other developers, and pursue a career in software development. I want to continue improving my skills as a programmer as much as I can, not only to prepare for my career but also because I thoroughly enjoy it. Coding is like breathing to me. It is constant, necessary, effortless and automatic. Art, on the other hand, is my nourishment. I need it just as much to survive. Music, visual arts, poetry, and storytelling are my preferred media. My goals for these involve progressing my technical ability and finding my own style, which I am accomplishing through regular practice and experimentation. In the short-term, I am working on a blended-genre album called "I Am Not Alone" that is about growing up as a neurodivergent queer person. Art has been a way to process my emotions, and I want to share these thoughts with the world. The perfect intersection among these varied interests is where my true passion lies: game design and development. Videogames as a medium incorporate all of my passions, both within and outside of software engineering. Because of this, my computer science and non-computer science goals are inherently intertwined, and I cannot have one without the other. My main goal in life, a perfect combination of computer science and the arts, is to have my own independent game development studio. I want to tell my own stories, build my own communities, and share with the world my own creations. Initially, my plan was to work for a large video game corporation, but I learned that game design was a very intimate process to me; I would never be satisfied making games that prioritized profits and sold products, not art. However, I will have to work for these large corporations to gain experience and earn money to supplement my creative endeavors until my game development career can take flight on its own. Reading Lyndsey Scott's mission statement on her Bold.org account when viewing this scholarship, I felt a sense of relief. The path I am taking to reach my goals is different from most, and seeing someone else do something similar and be successful has filled me with confidence. If given this scholarship opportunity, I would use it to one of two things. If it is feasible, I would use it to go to an out-of-state university that offers a degree in Computational Media, which would encapsulate exactly the education I need to be successful in video game development. Otherwise, I would stay in-state and use the scholarship money to graduate debt-free, allowing me to follow my creative pursuits sooner. My game design journal is filled to the brim and ready to turn into something for the world to see, with around a dozen outlines with concepts of gameplay, story, art, and music. Some of these may never see the light of day, but I will continue working so that I can make these dreams come true.