What made you want to do CS?

When I was a kid, my dad got an Apple IIe compatible personal computer called a Laser 128 for work and he let me use it. It had a whopping 128KB of RAM and no display. (You needed to plug it into a TV like a video game console.) However, I didn't care at the time because I could play video games on it. I remember playing games like Number Muncher and Carmen Sandiego.

If you didn't put a game diskette in the floppy disk drive and turned on the power, the Laser 128 would drop you at a BASIC prompt. I started playing around with the console and learning some elementary BASIC commands. However, "advanced" control flow structures like "for loops" were too complicated for my elementary school brain. So I went to the library and checked out some books on how to program games. In the back of those books, there were complete printouts of the code for games that I could then very slowly type into the Laser 128 and save to a floppy disk. After doing this a few times, I started to understand what the code was doing and my interest in computer programming was born.

For me there wasn't one thing specifically but a variety of reasons. This three come to mind:

1. I was good at it and enjoyed it.
2. I wanted a career that provided me with flexibility. No matter the company, the country, or industry CS skills are needed.
3. Lastly, the skills you gain are useful for non-CS jobs as well so it opened many doors. Keep in mind when you study CS you have options that cover the whole spectrum from going into more management/consulting roles to software engineering.

Now .. I have kids your age :) so computers were a novelty back in the day.

I went more along the lines of 'what don't I like' - so anything english/history/etc .. was out of the question.

I do like ...

1. being hands-on (I have no fear of computer hardware)


2. I'm very math literate .. I actually enjoy data and using it to paint a picture


3. I'm flexible and desire change .. the computer science industry is ALWAYS evolving.


4. A paycheck is always nice ... a computer science major is likely to find a job after graduation

Keep coding ... you may want to look at a raspberry PI so you can code and enjoy the results.

http://raspberrypi.org/

I was inspired at a young age about the fact that computers can do so many wonderful things, and that real people had programmed them to do all those wonderful things, so this meant that I could be one of the people who made computers do wonderful things. That was the motivation to get started, and once I had started, what I was able to do was its own reward: I can write programs to benefit me, my friends, and sometimes improve people's lives in general.