Soon, my graduation will be done and I can officially make my family call me Dr. Brian (Brian is my middle name and my family uses that, because of the large number of Davids in our family). I am typically not one to pat myself on the back, in fact, I typically have a hard time with other people patting me on the back too. However, I am proud of myself, my achievements and my metamorphosis.

(cue the squiggly lines and the music that indicates I will be reminessing)

As a teenager I was a bit of recluse who liked to hack away on his computer and started to program in order to create my own games and add features to the games I was playing. I was not much of a people person, but could cope with what I called the people problem. After I finished high school, I did not have much confidence in what to do so I went to a community college. There I started to find myself and my confidence. Gradually over the next couple of years I gained more and more confidence and decided that an Associates Degree was not what I wanted and that instead I want to get a Bachelor’s in Computer Science and become a programmer. So, I switched to getting my Associates of Arts degree in order to transfer to a 4 year university.

When making the switch I decided that I would challenge myself and joined the honors program. That is where I started to really gain confidence. Here I was, by all accounts a not so confident wanna be computer programmer and I was taking honors classes in humanities, history, philosophy, etc. I found that I had no problems with the classes and was even one the smarter students. I also became known for my sense of humor, which often found its way into my writings. I even ended up placing second in a school wide essay contest, not too bad for a programmer.

In my time at the community college I transformed from the kid in high school whose teachers forgot his name to someone that people I did not even know would start talking to me like I was their friend for the last 10 years. I became the vice president of the college’s chapter of Phi Theta Kappa (an international honors society), received an award of excellence for the work I did, created a cheesy “Where in the world is Carmen San Diego” type game about history for an independent study and gained a new self identity.

TO BE CONTINUED…