I am fascinated by the wide world of software, by the ability to achieve incredible feats with mere numbers, letters, and characters. However, my journey to that conclusion was hardly a linear path.I never emerged from the womb exclaiming, "Hello world!" I never joined the computer club in high school. I never attended a Hack-a-Thon in college. When asked to talk about myself, I never begin my story with, "Ever since I was a kid, all I wanted to do was code."Life would be boring if it was always so straightforward. I discovered coding a different way.I used to hate writing. As I began my senior year of high school, I thought, "I'm analytical, not creative. I don't want to write any essays. Just give me a bunch of math."That mindset didn't last long. Unexpectedly, the next two years instilled in me an appreciation for the creative process. I invested so much time in my writing that I actually began to enjoy it, as my coursework opened to the power of words, the whole worlds which fingers on a keyboard can bring into being. It became fun! Although my main interest still lay in mathematics and technology, I had become more creative.Enter coding. When I took coding classes in college (C++, assembly language, Python...), I excelled. Why? In my view, what makes programming special is that it combines the analytical nature of mathematics with the creative nature of writing to solve emormous problems. That is how I came to love software development, and that is why I am excited to pursue it as a career.