Community Statement

Starting in high school, I developed a school club that I co-founded with a couple of my friends that got rather popular as the years went on. This club was called The Gamer's Guild. The main goal of this club was to promote self-esteem in people that were having a hard time because back where I lived, not a lot of people found that wasting your time playing games was respectable. We would also get the club members together and talk about things such as game development and the changes that were made to a lot of the games that we played together. Discussing whether or not those changes were good or bad. Our meetings mainly took place on the Mondays and Fridays of the school week during lunch in a private room in the library. I had a very enjoyable experience when I was working with that school club. I helped make it, and I helped build it.

One of the other communities that I was a part of when I was attending high school,involved the yearbook club. For 3 years I was heavily involved in photography and for the third year I was an official member of the yearbook committee. Most of the work that I did in the yearbook committee was taking pictures of schoolmates and putting them in Photoshop documents along with their name, and if they were eligible, I would also put in a quote.

These experiences heavily influenced my interest in graphic design, so I took those experiences when I moved on to college to help tutor other students. This was mainly due to the fact that I had never tutored anyone before and I thought that it would be a new and fun experience. Students that were in the same class as me got better at 3D animation and modeling,and I always felt really good when I was able to help someone solve a problem they had with their project or anything they were working on. Most of the classes that were available at this college were classes that mainly focused in film production rather than game making.Somewhere along the line my interests changed from graphic design to programming, and I was very attracted to the idea that I could make software, or even program games themselves.

Which was the main motivator for me to start attending school at the University of Advancing Technology. While taking classes here I have been able to tutor students here, but oftentimes I do find that I am being tutored myself. Honestly, I feel that kind of community is one of the best ways for a community to flourish. Not by having a leader, but by each member of the community contributing in leading the whole. Once I've completed attending University of Advancing Technology and I graduate with my degree. I hope to move back home and hopefully along the line, be able to start my own community again that revolves around programming itself. Because like I said before, there weren't a lot of programming opportunities in my hometown. I want to be able to take the knowledge that I learned here and teach it to the people back home, people that I know are deeply interested in programming.