When I first moved to Pittsburgh, I was still in love with this organization called Rescomp. I don\’t know why. Toward the end of my job there, I felt like I had finally found my place. Working at rescomp was something that I had done completely from the ground up. I didn\’t know that much about computers entering college, but I was willing to learn. And so I did. I applied and obtained the internship. The following year I applied but was only given an alternate status. Then they asked me back again for an interview and I was finally accepted.

Recently, I found a former lead supervisor\’s presentation of the organization. There\’s a picture of me in it. And a highlight of the statistics of why the internship failed to meet its goal. Namely, lack of confidence (that\’s me), lack of speaking skills (again me), and lack of technical skills (me and me and me). Yet over the two years I worked there, I improved in all areas.

To this day, that entire experience speaks to my balance between humility and arrogance. Today, our tablet PC for the project was infected with a virus. So I hastily booted into safe mode and quickly removed the virus (cleaning the registry and removing it from the system32 folder). But the internet connection was disabled and I hurried over the helpdesk, where I declared that i had removed the virus and wanted to get my internet back. They didn\’t believe me and finally gave me a wide stare when I repeated that I removed it myself.