I created my first web page when I was twelve, but if you had asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would have told you that I wanted to be a doctor. As someone who had always excelled academically, I felt there were really only two options in life, and those were to either be a doctor or a lawyer. Since my mom always said I could be anything I wanted to be so long as it was not a lawyer, being a doctor seemed to be the obvious choice. I never realized that something I only considered a fun hobby could lead to both a college major and a career.

As one of the good kids in school, I was given computer privileges during study hall in junior high. My best friend and I set out to make what was, in our opinion, the best website ever. It was a collection of animated gifs we stole from every site we could find. In actuality, it was probably the worst website ever made, and also broke several copyright laws, so it's probably best that I didn't become a lawyer. The images were centered on the page and separated by horizontal rules, and the pages had bright, animated, tiled backgrounds. While this site has, hopefully, been lost forever from the school's servers, there was one good thing that came out of it. Over the course of its creation, I taught myself html. Yes, it may have been had and much of it is outdated now, but every single page on our site was hand written by me in a text editor. It wasn't until much later that I learned about the existence of WYSIWYGs such as Dreamweaver, and to this day, I would prefer to write my markup by hand than to let a program do it for me.

After this misadventure in webpage design, I didn't do much with my newfound knowledge for several years. It was high school, after all, and I had becoming a doctor to concentrate on. My junior year, I happened across the tripod website and first learned that I could have my own site for free. Up until that point, I assumed the only way to have a website was to set up a massive server in your basement. Tripod allowed me to develop sites in two very different ways. The first was just a text editor, which I was familiar with, but the other was pre-designed templates that allowed me just to put in my information, and it would make the site for me. Now that I could makes sites so quickly, I started making them for every activity I was involved in, from Key Club to Science Olympiad. I was drawn back to the text editor only when I decided I wanted a site just about me.

A couple different things happened right around the same time that encouraged the development of this site. The first was that digital cameras had become cheap enough that parents could give them to their irresponsible high school students. Having been accustomed to having to pay to have film developed when we took pictures, we went more than a little overboard with out new ability to do it for free. Also, I discovered dhtml, and a site that allowed me to use their pre-written code for free. What I needed, I decided, was a site that was essentially a photo gallery so that I could share all the pictures I took with my friends, but I wanted it to impress them. The best way to do that, I felt, was to add in crazy effects, such as following mouse-tails and hiding menus. I spent hours and hours every weekend working on this site, and when it was finished, I had to link between about fifteen different free tripod accounts to hold all the images. It was spectacular, in my opinion at the time, but it was a huge oral to update, so I put it away for a while and promised myself that I would get back to it soon.

After high school, I was still on my doctor path. I had gotten good grades in high school, excelled at the standardized tests, and joined all the right extracurriculars. I was accepted into a small liberal arts college known for placing graduates into the best professional and grad schools. I declared a major in biochemistry and signed up for nothing but science and math classes. I was right on my way to the path I had always assumed I would take. What I hadn't expected was just how boring those classes can be. The mass opinion at the time was that a person should choose their college major based on what they are passionate about, bot necessarily what they are good at. Based on this, I began to question the choice I had made. While I was good at math and science, if I wasn't passionate about it, would I really have the motivation to complete all the schooling required to be a doctor? And, honestly, would you want to let someone cut you open who was rather apathetic about the whole ordeal?

Homesick and confused, I decided to put my energies into a creative outlet. I created a message board to keep in tough with my friends from home. We played games, wrote stories, and posted pictures and updates on our now very separate lives. While the backend functionality was hosted and maintained elsewhere, the site did allow for custom designs, and I made it my personal mission to change the design once every week, which I did for sometime. Also during this time, I used a LiveJournal regularly to blog and frequently used their html editor to change the design of that site as well. At some point during this time, someone gave me a copy of Photoshop. The arrival of Photoshop into my life probably almost exactly coincides with the time that design moved from my hobby to my passion.

In the third trimester of my freshman year of college, I happened to notice that my school was offering a random class in Photoshop. We had no graphic design or multimedia programs of any kind there, and this class even had to be listed as a computer science class, as there was nowhere else to categorize it. I did everything in my power to get myself into that class. Unfortunately, they closed it after six seniors enrolled, so I never got m chance. Dejected, I scoured the course catalog for anything that sounded interesting. As my other two courses for the term were Calculus 3 and Calculus-based Physics, I couldn't bring myself to sign up for the biology class that I desperately needed. I was already so disinterested in the subject that I wanted something fun to counteract them.

I happened across a course that was open entitled "The History of Computing," although a better name would have been "Things about Computers the Professor Finds Interesting." While the course started with the history of computers, it quickly moved on to other topics. We had an entire exam on diagramming logic gates, which is something that I have never had any opportunity to use since then. The final portion of the course was to build our own websites. I was excited and I saw it as the perfect opportunity to update my now neglected personal site.

There are only a few things I really remember about this professor. Number One: He used a Mac, which seemed crazy to me at the time. Now, you would have to kill me to get mine away from me. Number Two: He had really long hair. Number Three: He told me I was not allowed to use frames and font tags. I was stunned. Shocked. Confused. What was I going to do? Then he taught me the basics of CSS, and from there, I was hooked. While I have had a number of truly inspiring teachers who have taught me more than I could ever put into words, I would like to thank you, Professor IDontRememberYourName, for that lesson. It probably changed my life.

That summer, no longer destined to be a doctor and still with no desire to be a lawyer, I left my college and transferred to the nearby community college. If I was not sure what I was going to do, it was best to figure it out for less than $30K a year. I enrolled in all kinds of computer and art classes. What I called my major changed weekly, from art, to photography, to computer science, to architecture, to graphic design, and so on. I changed my class schedule constantly, always wanting to try something new. What I really wanted, I decided, was something that could please both my logical doctor brain and my creative art brain. It was then that I happened to enroll in my first multimedia course.

In hindsight, this class gave me no useful skills, and realistically, only taught me what not to do in multimedia. The entire course centered around one project, which was to take a children's book and convert it into a PowerPoint presentation. The entire thing was supped to run straight through on its own with no user interaction. At this point, Flash, After Effects, and other motion graphics programs were very prevalent, so I have no idea why PowerPoint was the program of choice. Regardless, the project was to include sound design, video, photography, and animation. When I was feeling creative, I worked on readying the assets for the piece. When I was feeling more logical, I worked on forcing PowerPoint to do all kinds of things it was really never intended to do. I had never enjoyed a project that much. The instructor informed us that the multimedia program there was based off of a program at the local university. I immediately applied and upon completion of my associate's degree, transferred.

I cannot think of a single thing about community college that prepared me for the university I attended. While I could handle the intensity of the courses due to my year in doctor preparation, I really knew nothing about what I was doing in my field. My PowerPoint class placed me out of their introductory level course, so I entered into my first semester far behind where I should have been. One of the things I hated at the time, but now appreciate, was that they refused to teach us software. I took a video course, and they taught us all the necessary concepts behind shooting and editing a video, but they never explained how to use Final Cut or After Effects. It was something we were already expected to know or learn on our own, and almost every class I took followed that same principle. Now, I am grateful for that, as software changes constantly. If I had been given a course on how to use Photoshop 7, I'd be lost now that it's Photoshop CS5. Instead, everything I learned still applies to multimedia today, and I know I have the ability to learn any new software that I may encounter.

From all my schooling, as well as an internship I received through one of my instructors, I learned two very important lessons. The first is that, at least in this field, you really do have to be passionate about the things you are creating. Any kind of disinterest in what you are doing will be obvious in the final project. The second is that you cannot allow yourself to be restricted by what you already know how to do. As scared as I was walking into those classes that I knew nothing about, I learned, and eventually excelled. I have learned never to give up on an idea just because it seems too hard to accomplish. Usually I find that I learn several more things while I am researching the thing I set out to learn, and in a field that changes almost daily, knowing I can continue to learn and grow is exciting.

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