Passion Essay for Carnegie Mellon Robby Stigler

For my entire life, I have had an affinity for creating things. When I was young, it was by building Lego spires that seemed to stretch to the sky, or epic Lincoln Log castles that could win out over any dragon. But one thing that always frustrated me was the finite space and materials that I could use; it seemed that there was no way for me to create as much as I wished. Then in the third grade, I was introduced to video games. The possibilities seemed to grow before my eyes. Entire worlds were contained within cartridges and discs, entire stories and characters created by etchings on a ring of plastic. Even though, to start, my only thoughts were to play out these worlds that others had created, as the complexity and breathtaking beauty of video games advanced, my earlier affinity for creation set the idea in my mind that, if all of these other people could create such amazing worlds and stories in such a small space, why couldn’t I do the same?

This is the idea that seeded my interest in computer science that has continued to this day. However, this was all just theory for me. Up until high school, I had never actually taken an official computer science or programming class. So I decided to take a summer class at UTA...