Personal Entry 5 - Where I'm At Now

When your dreams and aspirations don't go according to plans, you just get right back up and try again, or try something new. I'm my case, I decided to try something new and follow a new path that I may find myself enjoying just as much as flying high in the sky. I guess the best way to start this post off is just blatantly saying, I got into computers as a kid because I thought I would be a fearsome hacker. Now I know that sounds ridiculous, because it is. I didn't know what exactly went into hacking and what the difference between coding and breaking through secure systems yourself manually, or using someone else's pre-programmed script was. I thought hacking was hacking and that was it. As I mentioned before, I'm a huge gamer and I tend to do a lot of my gaming on a PC. I currently build systems for my friends and built my own computer that I've been using for the past 2-3 years now which cost me a nice investment of just over $1300.

The capabilities this machine has are near endless, unless of course you ask it to start super computing. Then it would run into quite a few problems. Anyway, I became fascinated with how computers work back in 9th grade when I met my friend Jaden. He was tech savvy since he was a kid thanks to his dad who hosts the website for the Coast Guard. He taught me everything I needed to know to get into the cyber world and getting my feet wet. I started taking computer courses in high school where I learned how to type properly and quickly, as well as taking a web design class where I learned basic and intermediate HTML coding. At first I wanted to get into web design and go to college for it, until I found out it requires creative thinking and placement for graphics, so that idea went out the window. But I really enjoyed typing the code out, trying new things, troubleshooting the websites I was making when something didn't work properly. And once I got it, the satisfaction was amazing. I decided I wanted to go further into programming, but not necessarily websites; it was then that I remembered my old thoughts as a kid of becoming this amazing hacker. I knew much more about computers by now and knew it would require knowledge of a vast amount of programming languages. The only problem was, I didn't know how to go about it. I spent the rest of high school trying to find the time to learn things on the internet, but I always ran into the problem of being bored, being afraid I would get caught and just generally busy with other every-day tasks. Once again, fast forward to senior year in high school, we took a trip to North Carolina to visit family there and on the drive back we stopped at a rest stop which had a Dairy Queen. Long story short, I swiped my credit card, my information was stolen, and my bank account was progressively being drained as we were driving home without my knowledge. It sucked.

At that moment, I decided I wanted to use my interest in programming and hacking for good and fight against people who hurt others for their own personal gain (you could tell my mind matured quite a bit from the time I first learned about computers until now). I further went on to find the field of Cyber Security, to where I'm now attending this school known as Farmingdale State College majoring in security systems. I'm currently finishing up my first computer-related course of computer forensics where I've maintained an A in the whole semester, and I'm teaching myself the programming language known as Python right now. Additionally, I plan on helping a friend of mine with his website which will require me to learn a completely different programming language which I'm really excited for. I'm curious to see where my love for programming and security systems will take me in the future, although it's also opened my eyes up to the broad spectrum of Criminal Justice which I'm also highly interested in. So that's where I'm at now!