I have always loved activities that used math, science, and technology ever since I was a child. So my room was nothing but K'Nex and Legos growing up. I also loved helping my dad out around the house, helping him put up the fence, barns, and chicken coup, and refinishing the basement. He spent his whole career in radar and eventually started a business installing and maintaining ground-based navigation and weather systems for municipal airports.I'd often tag along with him when he'd go to his airports in the summer, on weekends, or after school. Besides the all too common wasp or rat nests on the sensors, faulty components were the most common reason for failure at a site, usually victims of a lightning strike. So he'd pull the circuit boards out and repair them at home. I remember sitting by him a few times, and he'd try to explain how logic gates worked, counting in binary and hex, ohm's law, or what volts, amps, and watts were. The more he'd explain his work to me, the more I knew I wanted to be an engineer like him.When I entered middle school, my friends and I formed a competitive robotics team using the Lego Mindstorm RCX robotics platform. We'd build robots together, they usually left the programming to me, and we'd compete against other regional teams. One year we even won regionals. I also built my first computer around this time, unbeknown to my parents, by scavaging spare parts my dad had lying around.In high school, I was pretty nerdy. So I spent much of my time reading sci-fi fantasy books. Brandon Sanderson was and still is my favorite author. I was also getting into Dungeons and Dragons. There also happened to be this pesky thing called homework at the time, and I received a programable calculator. A TI-84 capable of running TI-BASIC to be specific. I was able to teach myself TI-BASIC and then I started programmed my calculator to solve physics, chemistry, and math problems for me. After I had the programs, homework (and tests...) were a breeze leaving me ample time to return to my books or work on my D&D characters, which I also made programs for.After high school, with my self taught programming abilities, I enrolled at the University of Cincinnati, studying IT with a focus on software development. Having a tremendous interest in business, both in running and supporting, I pursued an MBA at the same time as my undergraduate degree.