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It all began in the 4th grade of elementary school, when I set up my first Minecraft server. While at the time I was excited about being able to play Minecraft with my friends, I did not know it would put me on a trajectory that would change the rest of my life.

I wrote my first Java program in 7th grade when I started making Minecraft plugins. At the time, I owned a server and liked to build Minecraft minigames for my friends to play on. I would spend a couple hours programming– building a chest loot generation system or a world rollback system– and when I was finished I’d play on it with my friends. Seeing other people having fun and being impacted by something I built was extremely rewarding and helped cement my love for programming.

In high school, even though I started to grow out of Minecraft, I still liked developing programming projects. For the science fair one year, I built a school closure predictor which used the current weather and machine learning to try and predict if my school district would close. I attended Georgia’s Governor’s Honors Program as a Software Engineer the summer after my sophomore year and the summer before my senior year I ran online technology camps for kids wanting to learn about topics like cybersecurity or programming.

As a college student, I’m continuing to learn and explore my passion for programming. I’m a part of the UGA Association for Computing Machinery and this summer I’ll be interning at NCR in downtown Atlanta.

While my Minecraft days may be numbered, I hope I can bring my passion for building software to make a difference in more people’s lives.