Since early childhood, I wanted to be a cartoonist. I spent hours doodling when I should’ve been paying attention in class, studied in various summer-art-camp programs, won a few different art competitions in middle school, and even tried submitting cartoons to the New Yorker when I was 14 (though I obviously didn’t get in). Those dreams of being a cartoonist morphed into dreams of becoming a game designer when I was introduced to the online world of Adobe Flash games, but at the time I didn’t have the technical prowess or discipline to make any games of my own. Still, when I got to college, I tried my hand at becoming a computer scientist, in hopes that I would one day use my skills to make something big.

Unfortunately, in those early years, I was plagued by academic troubles, and eventually came to think that I didn’t have the discipline to cut it as a game designer. So I wound up abandoning my dreams and focusing on mathematics instead, which I assumed would get me a good job in a more stable field. But unfortunately, upon graduating with my mathematics degree, I still didn’t know what else to do with my life. So I wound up having to teach myself the computer science I would have learned in college anyway, using a variety of online materials and courses. And after about a year of studying, I finally landed a job at Point72 – a hedge fund in Stamford, CT – where I worked for two years.

At this hedge fund, my artistic skills made me my team’s go-to UI guy. This, despite the fact that everyone else there was way more experienced than me at doing back-end stuff. I designed logos and icons for the various apps we were developing, but my passions were never really in finance, and I had moral misgivings working for a company that had been the center of the biggest insider trading bust in U.S. history. The truth is, none of the fields where I could apply my talents really struck me as “moral.” Either I’d be building something that put a little guy out of business or creating something that was designed to addict people (usually both). And still, my mind kept wandering towards my old passions: cartooning and game design: interests that were not shared by many of my colleagues.

So when one of the higher-ups at Point72 (who’d I’d really liked and respected) decided to resign from his position in the middle of the COVID pandemic, I realized it was probably time for me to jump ship as well. I realized that in order to work in a field that interested me more than finance, I’d have to go back to graduate school and learn either more about computer science or more about art. So I decided to go for a degree that compromised between the two, and take a crack at my old dream again: video game design. I studied for the GREs, looked at which universities had the best game-design programs, and now here I am.

My artistic interests haven’t waned over the years. In college, I performed in a number of choral and theatre productions: playing leading roles in Shakespeare and Sondheim plays, and joining various choirs that took me around the country. With my Gospel Choir, I managed to tour the Southern United States, and with my Chamber Singers Choir, I even got to sing at Carnegie Hall. I retain a keen interest in cinema, and since my graduation from college have been working on a script for a series that I envision either becoming a comic book or live-action TV (I’ll probably wind up doing one before going for the other). My hope is that I’ll be able to develop these artistic interests while I’m here at WPI, while learning the technical skills that’ll make me useful to other companies. Eventually, I’d like to work at some larger video game company for a little while, before breaking off and selling my own work on Steam or some other such platform.

Since this particular course is an artistic course, I’d like to use my time here to work on my artistic skills. I want to both improve my existing skills, and try to develop the things that I haven’t done yet, like 3D modeling and animation. I’ve been out of practice drawing for quite some time (a course I took in college killed my love of drawing, and made me feel like everything that came out of my pen was crap), so I’d like to get back into practice. I plan on doing this by doing 100 rough sketches and also working on drawing up one of the scripts I wrote for that aforementioned tv-series/comic book. I also hope to create a couple of rudimentary video games and animations, perhaps work on my coding skills as well. I don’t know what I’ll be able to get around to during this course, what with all the work from my other classes, but I’m optimistic. I suppose I’ll find out what my limits are over the course of my time here.