What started out as some random act of fate, turned out to be a career obsession. Rewind, a decade and a half, it was the first personal computer that came home. After much brouhaha within my community about computers being too expensive, my dad felt that it was a much-needed addition to the family. Though the intention was to develop a sense of computer knowledge; for my brother and me it meant unlimited access to video games. Being a gamer for nearly five years hence, and having played enough number of video games ranging from Mario to GTA, I realized that it was not the games that created the zeal in me but the computer itself that had me taken by a swish. In my primary school, getting access to a computer was more sort of a wonder, but …show more content…
Having been able to type and save a document to view it later? Who would have thought of such stuff? Things escalated later, and when I coded for the first time using the Java basics I learned in my high school, and I saw the computer do what I wanted to with a few lines of code, the kind of enthusiasm it filled me with is something that I can’t measure up. In India, it is very prevalent that students are exposed to various sets of competitive exams and one among them is the Cyber Olympiad. Having taken the exam with less than the minimum amount of interest, I happened to stand first in the entire school. This was my first marker that I was somehow connected to the computer instrument in itself, and with the advent of so many social media elements, my association with computers only kept getting …show more content…
In my junior year, I transcended to become the facilitation head of the organization spreading whatever knowledge in various regional level workshops across the country for more than two years now. It was in this encounter with SPEED that I realized that Computer Science had been a key to solving many existing issues. I then decided to make use of the situation and the knowledge of Computer Science I possess. The experience that I gained from building numerous small Android applications and my extensive coding skills in Java helped me start a mobile payment application ‘SoftPay’ that could make money transfers without the use of the internet. Students studying in remote areas could transfer their payments or any voluntary donations to the non-profit organization using this app. The scale of the project, and for achieving the impact that I envisioned required vast amounts of knowledge in various domains. The application served its primary purpose,