My work schedule was incredibly difficult. I would go to class, do homework, and work 15 hours a day so that I could work from noon on Friday to, on some occasions, 2 a.m. on Saturday morning in order to complete my work for the software development team. I would wake up early Saturday morning and work up until the team call to finish any remaining work. Even with this schedule, I was doing at least my portion of the work and meeting my deadlines. After a few weeks, it turned out that one team member was not pulling her weight and the rest of the team needed to pick up the slack. During this period, my grades suffered due to my lack of sleep, and I was barely able to complete my homework assignments. Even worse, because I had not made my setup ergonomic or discovered the computer athlete concept, I had numb and cold fingers, elbow and wrist pain, and tingling in my hand. Then I experienced one of the things that people encounter when they have one or more repetitive stress injuries; your body begins to feel strange; as a result, you have difficulty sleeping, which compounds the problem. During the week of midterms, I was in so much pain that I could not use the computer at all. I had developed trigger finger in my left index finger, among my other injuries, and was in a very bad situation.

After midterms, I had spring break and some time to recuperate. It was at this point that I faced the harsh reality that I would either need to find a profession that did not involve intense computer usage or fix my broken computer habits. I reasoned that it would be easier to fix my habits than to change my major, even though I was not sure whether I would recover or how long it would take. However, I did know that if I didn’t fix my habits and recover, I would need to give up my Microsoft technical scholarship, internship, and two years of college tuition. Also, Computer Science was not something someone had pushed me into. I have had a passion for software and computers since I was 10, even though I had no mentors in the subject in my immediate family. As well, I still wanted to start my own software company one day. On a mission to fix my habits, I began to do research.

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