High School Writing: College Paper

My body lies sprawled across the wooden floor. All I can see is the dingy ceiling as my head rests against my own blood. I only but sense my hands trembling, as I can not feel them myself. I can no longer control my limbs. The only true feeling I have left is the rapid beating of my heart as I wait for my enemy to finish the job. Then... I had to eat dinner.

There's nothing like creating things from scratch. Ever since I was in the 3rd grade, I always loved making things with my own two hands. As I grew older, my level of creations grew as fast as my desire had. I went from tracing my hands onto a piece of paper to painting a caricature of one of my friends on Adobe Photoshop. But as much as I loved to create things, I had always wondered: how is it that I'm able to create these things? Who made the objects and software that I use to create? That's when I learned about Computer Programming.

In 6th grade, my mom told me about a camp named "ID Tech Camp" at Northwestern University. All she told me was that I'd get to make video games, and what kid wouldn't want to do that? It was a 2 week program, and within the first few days, I loved it. We used an Authoring tool called "Stagecast", a simple program that was used to create games in a simple drag-and-drop style interface. Unlike the other kids in the program, however, that's not all I used it for. I found myself working with variables, conditional switches, data storing and outputting while the other kids were figuring out how to draw a 2D star and make it move 1 space forward. I can still remember the excitement of putting all of my ideas into action. Realizing that I myself, created a program that others can use. But once again, my curiosity took hold of me, and I asked myself: How was Stagecast created? When I discovered C++ I jumped from "Hello Stagecast" to "Hello World".

Programming in C++ is not a chore to me, but a hobby. Just like baseball is to kid or painting is to a teenager, Programming is something I do because I love to do it. I can sit down and write 700 lines of code, and not once feel as though I'm doing work. As my knowledge in C++ increased, so did my desire to learn about other programming languages. As of Senior year, I'm currently taking AP Computer Science, which is a course in the Java language. I also ended up teaching some HTML, Javascript and C# to myself. I found that you soon learn to realize that they are all somehow connected, and you can learn a little bit of something from all of those languages. Just like a friend once told me before: "It's not that hard".

By no means am I calling myself an expert, because there is always something to learn. There is no such thing as being the perfect programmer, because unless the compiler says so, there is no such thing as a perfect program. When little kids were looking up to Ken Griffey Jr. and Barry Sanders, I was looking up to Richard Brodie and Bjarne Stroustrup. When I finally get the decision to be what I want to be in this world, and when I see myself fulfilling this dream, I know that it'll be because of the teaching that I received from the Computer Science teachers at _________. There is obviously an amazing reputation at the school, as pointed out by magazines such as EGM, as well as great talent and creations that have branched from the schools teachings: i.e. Red Faction: Guerrilla & Spider Man 2. I believe that there is just so much for me to learn at this school, and would be happy to be a student at _________.