Going into college I wanted to be an animator and thought I would love it, however it turns out I was wrong. I joined RIT as a freshman in the Motion Picture Science program which RIT considers a new economy major because it combines film, math, computer science, and physics. As time went on I kept telling myself I would double major in Animation, that was until we started coding in my freshman imaging project class. In this class is where I started developing a love for imaging science and software engineering. The official title for this class is Innovative Freshman Experience, a class where you are thrown into developing an imaging system for two semesters in order to present your work at Imagine RIT, a convention where hundreds of students come together to show off their work for the year. Our assignment was to create foosball, table tennis, and air hockey tracking systems. I was part of the foosball tracking team and made it my mission to create a bar tracking code that would allow for the bars and players to be visualized within a virtual reality scene that others on my team were working on. Coming into college I had no coding experience so at first this class felt incredibly overwhelming seeing as we were thrown into the project with no real lectures from our professors in order to learn how to code. We were told to predominantly use python as our main programming language for building our tracking system. At this point I had decided that I was all in, I was going to work hard in order to learn how to code using python. Over the course of two semesters I dove into hours of research, testing, and feeling defeated and frustrated when I didn’t understand how to make my code functional. I watched hours upon hours of videos on YouTube to try to get a better understanding and to feel like I was pulling my weight on my team. I absolutely, without a doubt, unequivocally hated this class. I spent many nights crying because I thought I wasn’t cut out for a computer science based class, after all that’s not what I came to RIT for, so what was I going to do? I doubled down and told myself I would succeed, it took weeks which turned into months but eventually I realized my love for coding. I loved working on this imaging system project so much that I scrapped my plan to become an animator and I declared a double major in Motion Picture Science and Imaging Science. I had ended my second semester in college having built a functional foosball bar tracking system in a programming language I had never used before and I felt proud of myself. In the end I didn’t have time within the class to finish visualizing my system within a virtual reality space but I didn’t care, in my eyes I succeeded. Working on this project helped me realize how I want to make my mark in this world. One class, one coding project, and the entire trajectory of my future plans were changed. Imaging Science has opened me up to countless future job possibilities and opportunities. I could go into aerospace engineering, create satellite imaging systems, join the medical imaging field, or become a software engineer with a focus on creating diverse color systems for computers. I plan to spend the rest of my life working with technology because it makes me happy, it sends me through a never ending rollercoaster of emotions and I love it.