College: Nothing Else To Do

I entered college immediately after high school, mostly because I didn’t have any other viable alternatives. I didn’t really want to go on to college, as I felt I had more than enough schooling to last me the rest of my life. However, since I didn’t have any other options, I continued my education.

At first I wanted to be a physics major, until I realized how much math would be involved in that career choice. I have always hated math, and for that reason didn’t want to choose a career in any of the "hard" sciences such as physics or chemistry. After taking a couple of these classes my lack of motivation became obvious, and I switched my major to something more to my liking.

Fortunately for me, I had taken a computer science class in that first semester. I didn’t take this class for any particular reason, I just needed to fill out my schedule with something and a class in computers seemed like a good choice.

I feel in love with computers almost immediately. Programming, at the time, was very creative and logical. Also, since I had never even seen a computer before, it was new and wonderful. Finally, some of the people in the computer science classes were very nice, and many of them became good friends.

Slowly my schedule became dominated by computer classes and lab work. In addition to the classes, I began spending every free moment in the computer lab, writing ever more complex and useful programs. By the end of my first year at college, I began work on a tool that would prove very useful in my future. It was call SPRUTL, and it was intended to be a utility program to replace several standard tools on the computer. I did such a good job on this program that I brought it with me to a job interview, and got the job.

In my second semester in college, I took a class in MACRO assembly, which is a very complex computer language. My teacher was named Rick, who was teaching as a way to make some extra money while he was trying to start a company. A year later he hired me as his first employee.