Personal Essay

hey there i just finished writing the first draft of my personal essay and i would really appreciate if anyone proofread the essay.

The Prompt:
Some students have a background or story that is so central to their identity that they believe their application would be incomplete without it. If this sounds like you, then please share your story.

The Essay:

The first time I was given a computer I didn't find anything appealing about it other than playing games; a few months after which I eventually got bored and wrapped it away in the attic. It wasn’t until the eighth grade that my passion for computing started its journey with programming. The first programming language my eighth grade teacher, and probably the only teacher, ever taught me was VISUALBASIC; unlike most other kids in my class, who didn’t care much about computers other than playing games and social media sites, I was fascinated by the idea of transforming thoughts into words that a machine could understand and execute.

Being intrigued by this, the first thing I did when I came home was search through my attic to find the computer that I had once thrown away. The refusal of my teacher to teach me anything more than that was in the school syllabus didn’t stop me from learning. To make matters even worse, the place where I lived didn’t have an internet connection, the books in my school library were insufficient as they only illustrated what to write and when to write it, but not why. This left me to tinker around with the very few sample codes provided within the language. I’d find myself spending nine hours a day, at times even more than that, seven days a week, tinkering around voraciously with whatever I had at my disposal with nothing but the ticking sound of the wall clock to accompany me.

There’d be times when if coding didn’t go my way I’d forget to eat; I’d forget to sleep and at times, simply dash out of the house making up my mind never to look at, or even think about programming. However, as soon as I would get home I’d feel this unwavering invisible force of attraction that would draw me towards that very thing I swore never to take a glance at, which in turn would make me keep trying, and trying harder, until I got things right. Every weekend I’d come up with a project to work on which would engross me until I get it done, and the level of complexity with every project I uptake would increase exponentially. Those weeks of hard work eventually paid off when I became the first ever person in the entire school to know more than what the A-Level computing syllabus had asked for; thus making me a beacon of computing knowledge to all my fellow high school seniors to ask for assistance with their end of the year computing coursework.
But I didn’t stop there. I kept on expanding my horizons, and within less than two years I had gone from just learning VISUALBASIC to C, C#, C++, JAVA, and web development. I even learned low level machine code to make my own artificially intelligent operating system like JARVIS, something that none of my teachers learned until their last year of college. Learning all of those languages wasn’t an easy task for me. Due to not having an internet connection I’d often find myself walking two miles from home to the closest cyber café I could find only to browse the internet for thirty minutes or so, just barely enough time to download all the free e-books and tutorials I could find.

I might not have accomplished anything astounding, or have done anything to put my mark on the world, or made history like Steve Jobs, but, all I can say is my passion for computing has not only made me a determined self-motivated individual; it has also showed me that to every problem there’s always a solution if you’re determined and look deep enough.