“I am the technical director for Wilsonville High School. When I was nine I built a computer by myself. For Christmas or my birthday, my father handed me a bunch of components to build a computer and he said “I want you to figure it out. If you break it you break it, if you don’t then you have a working computer.” I sat there for three days and I built the stupid thing. It came from my sheer will to learn it because I hated that I could never figure it out. It was so advanced in my mind, if I could do this I was like a superhuman. That was my drive, doing something nobody else could do. Then, I found out a lot of people can do it. The general mentality is a lot of people just want to figure things out. Building computers at nine opens up your mind to what could be done. I’ve always been attached to computers since then, and back then it wasn’t computers like today where you can just plug in components. There were slave drives, there were jumpers, you had to use IDE cables; there was a whole process to it.”