Jerfenson Cerda Mejia

TL;DR: Technology and programming has become part of me, it has given me many opportunities in life and it essentially made me major in computer science.

I was born on November 17, 1996, in the Dominican Republic, a small country in the Caribbean. I lived a majority of my childhood there until I was 11 and moved to the United States. My childhood wasn’t as easy as others since I had a hard time with school and spent most of the time in the streets. My mother lived in the United States, and my father was there but, I didn’t have a great relationship with him. I didn’t have anyone to guide me, I wasted my time in the streets and skipping school. When I turned seven, things started to change. An Internet Cafe opened in my neighborhood and I spent all my time in the Internet Cafe playing video games and exploring the Internet. It was the first time I ever played a video game in a computer or used the Internet. It was an amazing first experience that changed my life for the better.

When I turned eleven, I moved to the United States with my mom. Here my I became even more intrigued with technology, I wanted to learn everything about computers, how videos games were created and also websites. My first career thought was to become a video game designer because I was so amazed how video games developers created games with such high resolution and mechanics. As I interacted more with computers and videos games, I became curious of how these things were created and worked. My curiosity took me to the world of computer programming language.

The first two programming languages I started learning were HTML and CSS. From there a went beyond that and started applying to small coding boot camps for high school students. I had the opportunity to get into CodeNow where I spent two weeks learning Ruby from professional coders who worked in big tech companies. Programming became a central factor in my life, and I wanted to find out more about it. During my junior year in high school, I applied for a competitive internship in NYC Generation Tech where I and others formed a group and competed against other teams to create the best App idea and win five thousand dollars. During this time I was partnered up with a tech company called Deloitte, and they challenged us every way possible in our app idea. At the same time, I was learning so much and making so many great connections with talented people. By the end of the internship, I decided that Computer Science was going be my major for college. I have become a different person because of these things, and I’m proud to keep pursuing them and keep learning more about technology and computer programming.