I was seven years old when my family bought our first computer, and it was love at first sight. I remember my mom and uncle attempting to set up the computer, and I remember wanting to push them out of the way so I can figure it out myself.

My parents found it difficult to pull me away from the computer. They would constantly tell me to get off and go do something productive. I would even stay up past curfew to sneak back upstairs and spend an extra hour or two on the computer. I enjoyed recreating and altering images in Photoshop. In high school I created my first website to display the cartoons I drew of my friends.

By my senior year of high school, I started trying to think what I would want to study in college and what I would like to do for a career in the future. I was stumped.

One day, I was drawing my usual cartoons of my younger sisters. I handed the drawings to them, thinking they'd want to color them in. But instead they looked upset, and my sister Alexa started to rip up her cartoon. My sister Lauren then stopped her and said that they should get back at me and draw their own cartoons of me.

About a half an hour later, Lauren handed me her drawing. She had divided the paper into four sections and wrote "Things Sam Does" at the very top. The four sections consisted of eat, sleep, sit infront of the computer, and draw "mean" cartoons.

Looking at Lauren's cartoon depiction of me, I realized that I clearly had strong interests in art and computers. And a future career that combined these two interests would be ideal.

The web design/development field involves such strong interests of mine that I don't even find a career in this field to be work. For me, web design/development is more of a hobby since I could (and sometimes do) it all day.