I wanted to go into the medical field. That had been my dream for my entire life — becoming a pediatric trauma surgeon.
Age 16, I fell down a staircase, hit my head on the banister, and suffered a grade three traumatic brain injury. I went from a being a straight 4.0 high school sophomore at college-level reading to failing pre-K material. I couldn't read. I couldn't make sense of the world. I looked okay, but my old mind was gone.
Prior to the head injury, I had been good at math, but I hated it with every fiber of my being. I didn't really understand it that well, I just knew how to do it. About a year after the head injury, I found that while I had lost my talent for the natural sciences, I had gained the ability to understand math and logic at a deeper level.
About two years after the head injury, I'd regained a lot of ground and was mostly back to high school material. I'd decided I wanted to make educational software for my senior project (I'd been given an extra two years to finish high school because of the brain injury.) This led to my learning programming, and falling in love with it.
I've been coding for nearly a decade now, having self-trained myself in multiple languages. The challenges I had to overcome to get here have uniquely enabled me to teach and mentor others. I wouldn't trade this career field for anything.
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I wanted to go into the medical field. That had been my dream for my entire life — becoming a pediatric trauma surgeon.
Age 16, I fell down a staircase, hit my head on the banister, and suffered a grade three traumatic brain injury. I went from a being a straight 4.0 high school sophomore at college-level reading to failing pre-K material. I couldn't read. I couldn't make sense of the world. I looked okay, but my old mind was gone.
Prior to the head injury, I had been good at math, but I hated it with every fiber of my being. I didn't really understand it that well, I just knew how to do it. About a year after the head injury, I found that while I had lost my talent for the natural sciences, I had gained the ability to understand math and logic at a deeper level.
About two years after the head injury, I'd regained a lot of ground and was mostly back to high school material. I'd decided I wanted to make educational software for my senior project (I'd been given an extra two years to finish high school because of the brain injury.) This led to my learning programming, and falling in love with it.
I've been coding for nearly a decade now, having self-trained myself in multiple languages. The challenges I had to overcome to get here have uniquely enabled me to teach and mentor others. I wouldn't trade this career field for anything.