While many know me as a "the IT guy" thanks to my new position at our college's ITSD, my interest in computers and technology didn't come about easily. You see, I come from the rural north, home to sweltering summers and apocalyptic winters. And when you live through these seasons in the middle of the on the coast, computerized devices aren't exactly everyone's first concerns.
Instead of soldering chips to a motherboard or figuring out how I'm going to cram a huge GFX card into a case, I was encouraged to be more concerned with how the dying fruit trees in the yard were doing, or that I should go on the rocky hill behind our house and explore what I'd explored countless times before.
"Go outside!" I was told, constantly time and time again. My family feared me being a sedentary individual, which they were right to be, but at the same time, reading about various technical aspects of computing, and tearing small electronics apart during my free time was much more interesting than stacking wood (although given the fact that we mainly used a wood stove to heat our home during the near arctic winter months, that probably should've been a higher priority).
We didn't even have the internet during my early years. Well, we did, but all we had was dial-up. It was so painfully slow that loading a Wikipedia article took a solid five minutes. I'm actually happy that my first exposure to the World Wide Web and the realm of computing was from what amounted to no more than a four-story shack with dial-up internet and an early iMac G3. I would mess around in the drawing program while I waited for an article about some random technical jargon to load up. Eventually, my dad bought his own computer, and being very technologically challenged, my skills finally came in handy. I think this was the turning point that started him on the path to realizing that what I was interested in was actually useful.
With the onset of video gaming as a large interest, my father pushed and pushed to tear me away from the screen and get me outdoors. It was the typical father-son conflict that you see on many sitcoms nowadays, except now involving various outdoor activities that only a true "Mainah" would ever participate in. Lobster fishing (the worst of them all), wood stacking, brush clearing/burning, deer hunting, garden tending, chicken raising, landscaping, lumber hauling, farm truck driving, the list is endless. They all had their own Maine twists to them. There was no outdoor work done in anything but a flannel shirt and jeans, even on the hottest August days. "You're gonna get hurt," pops would say, and in my days of defiance towards everything he told me, the one time I wore shorts, lo and behold a massive tree branch kicks up and stabs my tender calf.
I didn't truly hate it all the time. Some of it needed to be done (like the wood stacking), and I won't lie, seeing the sun rise from the ocean horizon on a strange grey morning while pulling lobster traps behind Seguin Island was pretty special. But others really never seemed to make any sense to me. My dad once had a friend and I clear up our newly laid crushed-rock driveway by picking up every individual twig we could spot, and then tossing them into the woods. What we neglected to hear from my dad as we stormed away in angst to complete our seemingly enslaving task is that he didn't just want them in the woods, still visible from the driveway. He wanted them way in the woods, where he couldn't see them at all. So what began as a tedious endeavor turned into a several hour stint of picking up sticks we'd already moved once, along with all the other sticks in the WOODS where, might I remind you, THERE ARE STICKS EVERYWHERE, and throwing them as far as we could to keep them from my dad's prying eyes. My friend had expected a day of either gaming, messing with my dune buggy or the like, and what did he get? A day of stick throwing, and at the end of it all, after I urged my dad to pay him, my dad and his snarky sense of humor give my friend a single dollar. "Don't spend it all it one place!" he snickered.
As time went on, I pushed back harder and harder, fighting to spend my days tinkering with all things mechanical and technical as any teenager oppressed from his passion would do. Sometimes, just to spite him, I would spend a nice day inside messing around with something I knew couldn't be repaired. After all those years though, he finally started accepting that it was what I liked to do. He fully supported both my tech interest and my gaming habit once I graduated high school.
The moral of my tale is that no matter how much somebody tells says that you shouldn't do something that you feel is right (within reason of course), fighting for what you want is always worth it. I would've never gotten a job towards the end of my freshman year had I not been at least somewhat interested in computers, and I never would've wanted to come to Babson had I not believed that my interest in tech and entrepreneurship was a viable option for me. Fighting for what you want to while being guided in another direction is something that anyone can do. If a rural Maine kid can do it and manage to get to Babson, I think anybody else can too.
