User:RossKoepke/MTUEssay

Who or what influenced you to consider Michigan Tech?

• Visit • Atmosphere • Childhood •

The influences that lead me to Michigan Tech's gates were the experiences and opportunities I had as a child. Like a game of chess where someone discovers how to force a checkmate 11 moves into the future, my attraction to Michigan Tech was set in stone during my childhood. The real influences upon my life today were those that I was experienced between the ages of 3 and 10.

My sister was born two years earlier than I was. Because of this, she learned to read competently sometime just after my 3rd birthday. She then sat down with me for hours every day diligently teaching me what she learned. Thus, I learned to read when I was only three. It would take me another year to learn how to write, but in the meantime I became obsessed with reading. I devoured any literature I could get my hands on. I'd finish my sister's "Young-Adult" rated books in just a few hours each. The only inexhaustible source of information in my house was my father's complete set of Encyclopedia Britannica volumes. From these I learned about the natural world - an overview of anatomy, geography, physical science, and politics. My parents hung a world map in my room so large it dwarfed my own body - but I spent hours every day and night studying the map, imagining how the continents formed, learning where each country was, the capital city of each, and discovering that the largest ice shelf of Antarctica shares my own name - the Ross Ice Shelf.

My father taught me to play chess when I was 4 or 5.

The first computer I interacted with was my father's Zenith IBM-compatible. Battle Chess

Apple II.

Performa 636CD

I was born into an entirely different world than that which exists today. I grew up with computers made by Zenith, 300 baud modems, Windows 3.1 and MacPaint. I was in the youngest group to see the dawn of three-dimensional computer environments which I experienced the form of a game named Spectre VR which featured only the most basic polygon modeling - it could only draw cubes and pyramids. I saw the advent of telephony modems and PPP over TCP/IP. I saw the internet progress from Mosaic to Netscape Navigator to Netscape Communicator. I remember every

My first computer interaction was with a Zenith IBM-compatible that my family still owns. It sported a four color screen.