I was born with a brachial plexus injury causing a limited range of motion in my left arm. As a result, for the first 6 months of my life, I was completely unable to move my left arm. With physical therapy and surgeries, I was eventually able to gain function, but to this day I am still unable to straighten my left arm(fully extend sop elbow locks) or turn it over(palm face up). This disability has affected me for my entire life. As a child, I was taken to many hospitals for 4 different surgeries in hopes of giving me back range of motion in my left arm. However, none of the surgeries were truly successful as I never gained any more range of motion than I had originally. Living with this condition is a constant reminder that I will never be “normal” and my arm will never be able to function, as well as peers. My disability causes many awkward/difficult moments when I go to use my left arm to complete a task such as pick something up or hand something to someone. Although I have always had this condition hindering me, I have never truly let it hold me back. For example, as a child when I was learning to move around I was unable to crawl due to my condition, but I quickly learned how to roll and pivot to maneuver around. This caused my mother some trouble as rolling is significantly faster than crawling. Another example is that even though I have my disability I participated in baseball, basketball, swimming, football, biking, and pretty much every sport I could get my hands on. My favorite reminder of how resilient I am is that my mother convinced me to try soccer thinking I would be able to play without having to use my arm. Me being the child I was, I decided that I wanted to be the goalie. Although the coaches and parents tried to convince me not to, I was determined and impressed them when I proved that I was capable of being the goalie. This has always been a reminder to me of how persistent and relentless I am to do anything I set my mind to. Having a disabled arm has caused its fair share of bullying and ostracization from my peers, but I never seemed to let it bother me instead I have countless stories of times people have told me I can’t do something, or that I’m not good enough, and then I went out of my way to prove them wrong. I constantly look at my left arm and wonder what it would be like to have full functionality, but I don’t look at it as a weakness. I look at it as a challenge and a way to show others that no matter what hardship they face, they can overcome it if they set their mind to it. Just as I have. Thank you for taking the time to consider my application, I hope you enjoyed my story. My goal is to contribute as much as I can to the growth of technology. I plan to try and learn as many aspects of the computer industry as I can. I will always continue to educate myself either through college or self-teaching. At any job, I am given I will make it my goal to not only complete my tasks but understand the tasks of those around me. I want to know everything I can about the hardware, software, managing and securing databases, creating artificial intelligence, programming robots, and all the other wonderful things I know technology is capable of. I know this is ambitious and I realize that I won't be able to learn or retain everything, but if I can continuously expand my knowledge over the years I will be able to improve my overall understanding of all the possibilities and limitations of technology. A dream of mine would be to be able to work with human-computer technology in the form of robotic prosthetics. I would jump into any research and development as I could possibly use the technology to assist my disabled arm(I have a brachial plexus injury on my left shoulder). I would be truly happiest programming and designing robotic limbs that restore a person's or animal's ability to function. Simply put my goal is to learn and grow with technology, wherever I can do so most effectively.