"Write About Yourself"

Most uncomfortable thing you can ever request of someone imo. >_<;;;




I first joined the Simulation and Game Design Program when I was eighteen-years-old and fresh out of high school.  At that age, I was very free-spirited and largely interested in traveling and exploring the world around me.  Before I had entered high school, I had visited England, France, Italy, Switzerland, Austria, and had been deported from the Czech Republic to Germany on a trip with the YMCA to attend a Christian Leadership Conference in Prague with a group of fellow teens.  I was thirteen-years-old at the time and managed to keep calm while soothing the twenty-eight-year-old chaperone which had been deported with me as he had a panic attack.  The summer after I graduated from high school, I went to Russia for a three week riverboat cruise with my Grandparents where I made friends with my contemporaries employed on the ship.  By the end of the trip, I was already able to communicate basic conversations and understand more complex ones in Russian.

When I returned to America, I was antsy to explore more. While attending classes, I worked two jobs to accumulate 3,000 dollars for a trip around the United States my best friend and I had been planning since we met in our sophomore year of high school.  We purchased one-way tickets and flew from Charlotte, North Carolina to San Francisco, California on May 20th, 2008.  We explored the city and helped non-profit group Food Not Bombs feed the homeless for a few weeks, then purchased three month unlimited ride Greyhound bus tickets as our mode of transportation. We passed through thirty-one states and two countries, carefully navigating our trip to ensure we could find people to stay with as well as follow Warped Tour, a music festival, to spread awareness for a non-profit association Vegan Outreach. 

Negotiation, compromise, flexibility, decision making, budgeting, sociability, and assessing the character of others are all life skills we relied upon heavily during our trip.  There were times we trusted complete strangers to have wonderful experiences with, other times we were taught lessons about the dynamics of people and how to interact with them.  It was a wonderful adventure, through which I experienced and explored much of the United States and its diverse national cultures. 

My trip ended with me in Canada, where I worked for three months until I had an opportunity to move to New York City.  I pounced on the chance and lived there for two years.  While living there, I worked as a secretary and after a year of residency began filing papers to attend classes at a local school.  I realised I would not be able to afford going to school on my own while also trying to live in the expensive city and made plans to return to Charlotte so I could focus on my education.

Since I have returned to Central Piedmont Community College my grades have been excellent and I have been involved in extracurricular events on campus while still working a regular part-time job.  A highlight would be designing a game for teenage girls which received an honourable mention in the Games4Girls Competition held by the University of Illinois, primarily due to the judges being unable to defeat it. 

I have had fun learning about game design, but I have found that throughout my life, I have really enjoyed helping those around me.  I have always had a strong interest in psychology and why people do the things they do, so I have decided to focus my education in that field of study.  I hope to one day be able to properly understand, assess and advise those in need and have a positive effect on the world around me.