"When I was growing up I didn’t have a lot of ways to talk to people because I lived out in the boondocks of Northeastern PA, and everyone was so spread out. It was hard to socialize. So I was drawn to video games—specifically MMORPGs—as a way to pass time and as a way to meet people. That experience inspired me to try to make video games. I started programming and quickly decided that it was a field I wanted to get into, so I went into computer science. I’d like to get into the video game industry, but I’ve also recently been studying artificial intelligence and machine learning, and that’s really interesting to me too. But it’s also pretty difficult. Difficult to get into. Not a whole lot of resources online since it’s such an emergent field. I’m still trying to figure things out. Honestly, I wake up in the morning looking forward to doing good work and making my parents proud. I’d like to teach, but academia is cruel in a lot of ways. My family is kind of struggling financially, so I just want to get a job and help my family out for a while. Then maybe I’ll move on from there once I get some experience."