Cohort Stories: Meet Dalton
vol. 5, no. 23 — guest post by Dalton Grady
Throughout my twenty-two years there have been a variety of challenges that I’ve had to overcome. Some such as: adjusting to college, learning to balance my time, and figuring out who I am. But out of all these hardships there is one stands out to me: the passing of my own mother. My mother passed away in March of 2019 due to ovarian cancer, and it was truly one of the hardest experiences I have dealt with. I felt like everything had been taken away from me. But over this past year I have grown tremendously as an individual while being supported by countless family and friends.
I know that my mother supported me every step of the way; and living through her passing has taught me many to value the time that I currently have. If not for her, I know that I would not be where I currently am, and I believe that I am on the right track moving forward.
As a kid, I always had an interest in technology. Ever since I can remember I have been playing video games, and was surrounded by various technologies throughout my entire life. It was not until my junior year of high school in which I became fascinated with not only consuming technology, but developing it as well. During my junior year, my interest in video games shifted to PC, and as such, I started saving up money to build my own computer. After a few months, I eventually saved up enough money and was able to buy all the parts and put together my own computer (this is still a proud achievement of mine), which caused me to want to delve deeper into exploring the specifics of computers. During the second half of my junior year, I ended up taking a simple computer programming course which really sparked my interest in the overall concept of computer science. I was deeply fascinated by the ability that I had to do things; such as creating an (albeit very simple) asteroid shooter game in which I was able to add custom sprites to make it Star Wars themed. Ever since that class, and the overall boom of the CS industry, I knew that I wanted to learn more about technology even study it.
For the longest time I had no idea what my “dream job” was. All I knew was that I was interested in technology (specifically computers), and that was it. Upon first hearing about artificial intelligence (AI) I became curious, which led me to join the robotics team in high school. From there I enjoyed the concept of teaching a machine how to think and perform actions, but I found I was not interested in the actual mechanical aspect of designing and building a robot. Cutting forward to college I still had an interest in AI but was unsure of specifically what field I wanted to be apart of. That was until my mom’s passing during my junior year. Ever since then I discovered that where I want to apply my knowledge is in the medical industry, and I dream of being an AI researcher; building and assisting with the ability to help detect and combat infectious diseases in people.
I believe everyone’s life is valuable, and I would like to assist people with being able to detect and fight diseases earlier, making them easier to combat.