I’m currently a senior at UC Davis, where I am dual majoring in Mathematics and Computer Science. I transfered from the local community college where I did my first two/three years of lower division work.

I graduated with honors from Folsom Lake College, taking with me three associates degrees in Mathematics, Computer Science, and General Education and one certificate of accomplishment in Computer Programming.

Early Years: I’ve been taking college classes since I was 16, because high school was, frankly, boring. To spice stuff up, in fall 2003 I went down to the college and took the general Introduction to Computers class that served as a pre-requisite to almost all other computer classes. The following spring I continued my college career by taking the C Programming and Algorithm Design classes. This was followed the following fall (2005) by C++ Programming. Between all those classes I accumulated 16 credits, which is basically a full semesters worth and more than half of the subject-specific classes necessary for an Associates degree in computer programming.

Spring 2005 was my first full-time college semester. That summer I also met with a counselor from UC Davis who advised me that UC Davis has a unique General Education plan for engineers that I should be following, instead of the traditional General Education plan. (At the time I was a computer engineering major.) I’m just glad I caught it after only one class went down the drain.

Through the following semesters through Spring 2007 I completed all the (available) required lower division classes for Computer Engineering, Computer Science, and Mathematics. Upon transfer to UC Davis the following year I officially changed my declared major.

My first full-time year at UC Davis was the 2007-08 school year. Due to the work load of a double major, I bridged the summer by fullfilling the remainder of my GE courses and by taking some math courses.

I chartered the first three years of high school through a private Christian school in Florida called ABeka Academy. My thoughts about them can be found here.

Three years with ABeka was more than enough for me, so I switched to a home school program called ACAEA for my senior year. There I discovered that if I did two years of community college and then transfered to a four-year college, my high school record would be irrelevant to the four-year college admissions. This was great news for me because I had accumulated enough credits to graduate from high school by my third year, and I was continuing into my fourth year of high school basically just so that my transcripts would show four years of high school. But since my high school transcripts would become irrelevant there was not point in continuing. Thus, I only completed one semester with ACA before finishing high school and starting college full time.

I was home schooled my entire life. My mom was my only teacher, until high school, and taught me most of my subjects. The subjects she didn’t teach me I taught myself because things always made more sense to me if I could figure them out on my own.

I was always ahead in school by a solid two to three grades (depending on the subject) and always mathematically inclined. I have video of myself solving and factoring algebra problems at age eight. I really liked school, for the large part.

Things changed around high school, though, as the material became harder and the textbooks became less self-explanatory, hence we made the switch to the high school program mentioned above. I finished high school half-way through my senior year to start college full time at age 17.