My history by Joao Lucas

My history by Joao Lucas - December 2024 Scholarship Essay

I was nine years old when my father introduced  me to his college friend who majored in Computer Science. That man told my father about Scratch, a website that teaches kids how to code with interactive blocks. And this changed the course of my life completely. By making use of simple blocks Scratch helped me develop my thinking and logic skills. Learning to code for me was the beginning of a new era in my life, an era where I could build anything I dreamed.

I invested all my free time building what I could: I used to take the lego pieces and build cities out of my creativity, I used dry clay to build toy houses, coding replaced my toys and allowed me to build more creative things. My family did not have a lot of money to invest in coding courses and there was a limited amount of resources about coding available in Portuguese. This made coding a challenge to learn, I had to spend hours doing trial and error and trying to make copies of games I knew.

My father saw that I had good coding skills, so we moved to the United States dreaming one day I would major in Computer Science in an American College. I had to change my whole life after going to the United States and the worst was losing all my friends and families. In High School I impressed my computer science teachers with my coding skill, but socializing was almost impossible because of the language barrier and the culture difference. Because of the challenge in making new friends I started to copy the people I thought were cool, this led me to not believing in myself and losing my dream to be a programmer.

It was only in the last years of High School that a friend took me to church, it was in church that I changed my view about myself, and started believing in myself. I got my confidence back on coding, but I had a different purpose for coding. I want to use my coding skills to change other people lifes mentally and emotionally.

I developed a plan to achieve my goal. I spent my time learning how to be a leader, because I understood that this dream cannot be achieved without a group to help me. I became a youth group leader, leading different teenagers and understanding what problems they have and what is the most common cause of why they are having these problems. I taught people that they have value and copying others will only make them feel bad. I am always seeking people with problems and my main goal is to be to them, the friend I needed in the past. I am now in the process of gathering all the problems I heard and the best solution to each one of them, and coding a platform to keep all of them together so people can access it. I also dream that in the future I will have a group of people that can help others in their friendship.