Being a military brat is always hard. No matter how hard people try, nobody who hasn't experienced it can truly understand what it is like to be constantly uprooted. For me, it was worse. I have always been extremely ADHD. That made it almost impossible for me to connect with other kids. I was always the odd man out. The tesla coil: brilliant and energetic, but erratic, misunderstood, and perhaps a bit intimidating. Certainly not something anyone wanted to get close to. Whenever I moved, it was usually about a year before I made friends with anyone I didn’t live next door to. By the time I had made four or five friends, it was usually time to move again. Recently, however, something changed. Something that would alter my present …show more content…
They were the first people I had ever met who were just like me. Two ADHD military kids, just trying to make their way through a world that could never understand them. Together, we were unbreakable. On top of this, I finally had a teacher who understood me. When she looked at this tesla coil of a child, she didn’t see a disruption or a hazard. She saw potential. She helped me learn to work with other students and slowly but surely, I began to love school again. In the fourth grade, things got even better. In Henry Behrens, I found more than a teacher; I found a mentor. He saw me as an asset to the class, not an issue with it. He treated me with respect and slowly, the other kids started to as well. Unlike so many teachers who just lecture and teach ideas, he taught us applications and details. Nothing was taught on a base level or for its own sake. Atomic structure and bonding, electricity on the atomic level, plate tectonics. Geometry in art, and probability in backgammon. Basic algebra. He was the greatest teacher I have ever had. I loved his class like no other class before or since. He believed in me, and because of that, I learned to believe in myself. Fifth grade was not as good. I wound up with a teacher that saw me only as a problem, threatening the learning of his classroom. He targeted me at every opportunity, and I wasn’t sure what to do. In the end, I decided that the …show more content…
When I took my first programming class, I was enamored. One of my friends started teaching me about cybersecurity, and as I realized what it meant, what it was doing, I knew what I wanted to do with my life. You see, technology has changed my life. It has allowed me to make friends and build connections in ways I could never have before. I imagine a future where kids like me won't always feel alone. A future where moving doesn’t have to mean losing everything starting over. A future where being a tesla coil doesn’t make it nearly impossible to build friendships, and where classes can work for the students, and not just the other way around. Technology is making all of this possible, and I hope that one day, nobody will have to feel the way I have felt. It’s a beautiful dream, but it’s not perfect. This new and amazing interconnected world we are building brings with it a crippling weakness. There are people who want to tear it all down, people who want to use it to cause pain, and people who just want to exploit it for their own ends. That thought is unacceptable to me. Therefore, I intend to take what I have been given and pay it forward by dedicating myself to the field of cybersecurity, protecting this new world from that which would do it harm. At Colorado School of Mines, I plan to study computer science and cybersecurity. I will try to get summer internships at technology companies and learn as much