Cohort Stories: Meet Edgar
vol. 5, no. 26 — guest post by Edgar Diaz
To some, it is a challenge in itself to finish high school with the ultimate goal of having a college degree. Add to that: poverty, homelessness, language barriers and social stigmas. Some of my first memories include immigrating from the Dominican Republic to the United States. It was a challenging endeavor to leave everything you once knew to start a new life with the hope of living a better one. When we first got to Boston, we had to live in public housing due to being a low-income family. I was enrolled in Boston public schools, where it was challenging due to not speaking the language. After finishing high school, I went to community college for one semester and had to drop out to support my family, so my only choice was to work. After a few dead-end jobs, I was able to save some money and decided that I would pursue my passion in artificial intelligence and was willing to do whatever it took to learn as much as possible. I decided to go back to college and pursue a computer science degree. I did not know what it entailed, and was not sure if I would be able to do it. I was not the best student, but I knew that I wanted to pursue a career in software engineering no matter what. I had many ups and downs in college, and a lot of difficult and challenging classes that pushed me; at times it made me question my decision.
But I stayed positive and never lost sight of my dream and what I set out to accomplish.
All that hard work and persistence paid off, and I was able to get a BS in computer science. Living through and learning from these life challenges have shaped and made me who I am today.
I started to become interested in technology when I was around nine years old. My mother who worked to support me and my brothers did not really have much money to afford a computer or even internet. So I did what any nine-year-old with no money would do, and I picked up a broken computer off the street. I love learning and wanted to figure out the reason the computer was not working. I opened the computer up and was intrigued by all the circuits and hardware that made up the computer. I wanted to figure out the reason it did not work. I was curious as to why someone will throw something that my mother could not afford away. I started taking computers apart and putting them back together. I was motivated to learn how computers function from hardware to software. At the time, not having internet or access to a library meant I had to figure it out on my own. I spent days trying to figure out what needed to be replaced and how to make it work by reverse engineering the computer. With a lot of trial and error, I was able to learn from my mistakes and finally got it to work. Everything I learned from fixing a broken computer sparked my interest in technology and showed me that I love learning and being challenged.
What motivates me is learning. The reason learning motivates me is because I love being challenged by difficult problems. I love to work out difficult problems and try to really understand and reverse engineer them. The field’s that I most enjoy learning are science and mathematics, but my favorite field of study is computer science. I like all the different categories that I am able to learn in computer science; my favorite being machine learning. With computer science you have the ability to explore many different areas of the field and even come up with new ones.
I learn from teaching others; and the fulfillment that I get from being able to help somebody understand something motivates me. Teaching helps me re-enforce my understanding and learn at the same time.
I am motivated to come up with different ways of learning and ways to convey a subject through analogies and examples. There is a saying: give a man a fish, and he eats for a day; teach him to fish, and he eats for a lifetime. Learning motivates me because through learning you can grow for a lifetime.
