I can tell you from experience being a first-generation college student is not easy, but I am fortunate to have a loving family who wanted me and my siblings to be successful. We all came from humble roots but have grown in our own way. I am the youngest of three kids, and have an older brother and sister who have walked this path as well. Let me tell you a little bit about where my family came from. My mother grew up in the country in a very traditional Irish family. She only ever got as far as high school, but had dreams of becoming a writer that were never fulfilled. Instead, she chose to raise me and my sister, and was always there for us when we needed her. My father, on the other hand, grew up in the ghettos of Chicago, and never made it through grade school. He lifted himself up by his own hard work, scrimping and saving so that me and my siblings could have a future. His dream was to be an electrician, also a dream that would never be fulfilled. Instead, he worked on the Chicago Northwestern Railroad driving trains as a train engineer. He raised my brother, his kid from a different marriage, and eventually would start a family with my mother. He wanted to see us have a future more than anything. My brother was the first in our family to graduate. He currently works at Abbott Labs, and his field of study is the effect of microplastics in groundwater, which had earned him some recognition. My sister, on the other hand, took accounting classes and has seen success working with major clients giving them insurance quotes and financial advice. As the youngest of three, I am the last to earn my degree. I spent a lot of my life living comfortably, but not really doing anything meaningful with my life. It was not until a friend of mine asked me what I wanted to do with my life that I really thought about what career I wanted to pursue. I tried to think of what I might be good at, and decided on software development. With that goal in mind I decided to pursue higher education with the intention of earning the skills I needed to be successful, and to be the best in my field. I had spent a lot of time living with my parents, working jobs that were not well-suited to me. I had spent a long time saving up money to pursue college. The biggest hurdle in achieving higher education is always financial if you have no background in higher education. Nevertheless, I saved up for over 5 years, and in the process made it halfway through, earning my Associate's Degree back in 2016. Another 5 years would pass, and with the struggles of achieving a work-life balance, I set out to finally pursue my Bachelor's Degree. With the tools available to me now, I am finally able to create a better future for myself, and I want to make a positive impact on the world with the power of technology. With a Bachelor's Degree, I hope to achieve the dream that my parents could not, and stand out as an expert in the field of Software Engineering. I also hope people will be able to take a look at my life and be inspired to do the same.

If you were to ask me if my career would have taken me in the path I am pursuing now 5 years ago, I probably would not believe you. There was a point in my life that I wanted to develop video games, and I drew inspiration from scene programmers and indie developers (think of the people that made C64 demos and pushed the hardware to its limits). While I still have an interest in those hobbies, all that changed around 2 years ago. Let me start from the beginning. I first started attending college around 2013. I had made a decision to study programming, a subject I am still studying to this day. My ambition was to be like the people that made all of those indie titles I love so much, such as Cave Story or Risk of Rain. Fast forward to 2016 and by May I had finally graduated and earned my Associate's Degree, and I thought that would be the beginning of the rest of my life. But, much to my dismay, it seemed like nobody was interested in what I had to offer. I had spent years trying to break into the field of computer programming, not so much developing games, but just trying to find a job where I could put my skills to use. Days became months, which became years, and still, no luck. I was stuck in a position of being a customer service representative for a company called Sykes Enterprises (which has been since bought out), and that took about 5 years of my life. Recently I had jumped from that position to working at an Amazon facility in Elgin, IL. I thought I would find my big break here. Boy was I wrong! Warehouse work was tough, and I would constantly be coming back home feeling tired and drained. I lasted in that position for 6 months before I finally found a new job at a lab that did human specimen testing. It was here that my paradigm on programming shifted. During the interview, I had asked about opportunities for advancement, and I found out that this place had their own team of programmers! It felt to good to be real, and the more I thought about it, the more I thought this may be my true calling! As I did more research I found out something incredible. The healthcare industry was in the process of trying to move everything from paper to a digital format. They had been using the same systems for years! But it was not without its perils, as healthcare technology was fraught with problems. As this fact dawned on me I realized there was a demand for programmers in healthcare. It would be challenging, but moving healthcare to the digital age would be a good cause. With that mindset I returned to college to earn my Bachelor's Degree in pursuit of this goal. That is how I found my calling.

Let me start by giving you some context. I am a huge nerd! I love video games and tabletop RPGs, and I promise you that this will relate to the project I want to tell you about. I started studying programming around 2013. At the time I was attending FSW and earning my Associate's in Applied Science. What originally inspired me to start programming was seeing one man developer teams who made such impressive games such as Cave Story. I wanted to be just like those guys! As I went through my years of college, I learned that programming was nothing like I imagined! Most of the projects we have been doing were all done in command line interfaces, much like the ones you see in old DOS games! I was not sure were this journey would end up taking me. Fast forward to about 2016. It was May, and I had just earned my Associate's Degree. What I didn't know at the time was that entry level for most programming positions required a Bachelor's. I was fresh out of being only halfway through college, and I needed projects to fill out my portfolio. I did some of my own research, and it lead me to the most unexpected place I could think of. That place was Discord, a chat program which I use with all of my gamer friends. Discord has this neat little feature where you can add bots to the chat channels. I found myself hooked, and I absolutely loved the bots that I had seen on Discord and I decided I had to try to make one! So, I read a short crash course on how to make one of these bots. The secret is that Discord has an API just for this purpose, and armed with a basic understanding of Javascript, I went to work. I happened to really love a game called Shadowrun, and I thought it would be cool to make a Discord bot that could make skill checks for the players using the rules of the game. It was unlike anything I have ever done before, and I had reached a major bottleneck with getting the logic to work. I had spent some time reading Javascript reference manuals to get the code to work. All I knew was that the key to solving the problem was with the use of regular expressions, something I had worked in previously when programming in C#. After a while, life got in the way and I had to step away from the project. It lay dormant in the hard drive of my laptop. I think about a year passed. But then I went back to it. As I tried to read the documentation in my code, I gave it a once over, and it was at that moment that I had a major breakthrough, and I had that epiphany, and finally, the code had started to work! After that, debugging the solution followed shortly after, including solving some off-by-one errors in the code, and before I knew, I had finally built my first functional prototype! The core features of the program were working, and after having a friend test out the bot, I rewrote the code per his suggestions. On that day, I learned that sometimes it is best to step away and come back with a fresh perspective. With that experience under my belt, I finally returned to college to finish my Bachelor's Degree with this valuable lesson under my belt.

I absolutely love FLCL! I'm speaking from the experience of having watched the original run of the show, I still have yet to see FLCL Alternative and FLCL Progressive, but I want to watch those soon, too. It's a story about a young boy named Naota who encounters a girl from outer space named Haruko Haruhara. Through its 6-epsiode initial season, it explores the shenanigans of Naota and Haruko in the town of Mabase, where a thick haze has covered the air as a result of the recent construction of a Medical Mechanica plant. The show has a bizarre and random, if at times risque, sense of humor and is grounded thoroughly in its love of all things Rock 'n Roll, with its soundtrack being composed by the J-Rock group The Pillows. The 2 central characters even have guitars they use at one point or another as weapons, with Haruko initially hitting Naota over the head with her's, summoning a robot named Kanti out of his brain! The series concludes when the insane plot of the show comes to a head. The purpose of the Medical Mechanica Plant is to flatten the earth (it's shaped like an iron) and rid Humanity of its curiosity, but Haruko has secret ambitions to free the King of Pirates from their captivity. After a climactic battle the King of Pirates gets away, and Haruko leaves Naota to chase after him. However, in doing so she leaves behind her guitar as her Vespa scooter drifts off into space, with Naota looking up into the sky holding the guitar she leaves behind. The last scene pans in on the guitar in the middle of the night in Naota's room, as it plays a single note, presumably strummed by Haruko herself. I've always found myself to be a fan of random and bizarre, almost absurd humor in anime, and FLCL has it in spades! The show doesn't attempt to make any sense, and the random, off-the-wall humor is what makes it stand out for me. The anime is produced by Gainax, which has published such other timeless classics like Gurren Lagan, Panty and Stocking with Garterbelt, and the legendary Neon Genesis Evangelion! Hajime Ueda did the illustration for this incredible anime, and one thing I noticed about his style is the distinct looks of the lips of his characters, which lends itself to a variety of interesting expressions from the cast! Overall I would recommend the original 6-episode series! Very soon I would like to check out FLCL Alternative and Progressive!