The year is 2009 on Christmas Day, and under the tree lies a rectanglar box. I slowly open itto reveal a blue Nintendo DS, and Mario Kart game cartridge, the first piece of technology that I could truly call my own. It’s safe to say that as the years go by, technology continues to becomea crucial and important part of each of our lives, my life being no different. I played on my DS forcountless hours on end, and of course all of the games were exciting, but I always wondered, what makes the DS work. This lit a spark in me, and inspired me to learn more about technology. 2009 soon became 2011, and my Nintendo DS was replaced with a Nintendo 3DS. The firsttime, 7 year old me put a cartridge into the slot, I was blown away by how much has changed between the two systems. Everything on the screen had depth, vibrant color, and ran at a crisp 60 frames per second, though at the time, all I knew was that the games were extremely fun and engaging. Though the Nintendo DS and 3DS were very similar, the Nintendo 3DS added anextra slot on the bottom left of the system, which, when pushed open, revealed a blue rectangle called an SD card. At the time, I had no clue as to what it was, and I had zero access to the Internet, so I did the only thing that I could think of, experiment. I took the rectangle out of my 3DS, and turned it on, only to be greeted by an error message saying that an sd card is missing from the system, and that the system’s storage is low. After I heard that, I went to Best Buy, andstood in amazement as I saw a massive wall of SD cards before me, all ranging in different sizes. I spent allowance money that I had saved for months on a new 32 gigabyte SD card, and plugged it into my 3DS. Before I knew it, my 3DS could actually fit more games than it ever could before. This felt like my first real project that I’ve ever done without anyone like my parents or older siblings helping me, and made me interested in trying out other projects on my own. Fast forward to the present, and not only has my love for technology grown even more, but instead of using my knowledge of technology and coding to only help myself, I’m helping my friends and family get rid of computer viruses, and creating programs that can allow games frompast game consoles to be played on a computer. I enjoy what I currently do, but I feel as if I can aim higher, and I feel as if Computer Science would be the best next step for me.