college-applications/ut-supps/why-major.md

# Why are you interested in the major you indicated as your first-choice major?
  Since 2020, I have often turned to random YouTube videos to break the boredom of my days spent at home. I came upon a few videos of people programming games in the scratch software, and instantly, I fell in love. From then on, I spent time making simple games in Scratch, eventually evolving to making web games in HTML and JS.  
  During my junior year I was introduced to competitive programming, through my school's computer science club. I have always valued having problem solving skills, and this was my first taste of Computer Science’s ability to do that. At the time I saw it as just a hobby, discarding any thoughts of pursuing it in college for a major or afterwards as a career.  
  A turning point for me was when I was so frustrated with HockeyShift, an application that I used at work, that I started to make a Terminal User Interface (TUI) to replace it. At first, I wrote it in Python, using the Textual library for TUIs, however, Textual left me as unsatisfied as HockeyShift had, because of Textual’s limited widget and placement ability, along with the styling not matching the vibe I wanted. That summer, I had begun to use Linux and gained an interest in lower level programming, and I was fascinated with the power and control Linux gave me, quickly setting up an entire environment with custom configuration. Because of that feeling, I decided to use a library in a lower level language that matched that power. I looked at C first, given its widespread use through the Linux kernel, but found it lacking in modern TUI libraries, so I settled on using Rust for the language and Ratatui for the library. This was the first time I had worked with a compiled language, and compilers immediately interested me, especially when the Rust compiler rejected a piece of code I thought was fully sound, but ended up having several small type errors that would’ve likely gone unnoticed in Python and been a headache to fix. I was thoroughly impressed and humbled. As of now, the TUI is still being made, and currently has about 50% of the functionality of HockeyShift. Building a tool for my own use, not for a contest, was when I realized CS was the right major for me.  
  Computer Science at the University of Texas at Austin called out to me due to the courses offered within the Turing Scholars Honors program. In particular, the CS 311H/314H and CS 439H courses appeal to me because they contain two of my favorite topics I’d like to explore more within Computer Science: Data Structures and Algorithms, and Operating Systems. Furthermore, I’m excited to hopefully have the opportunity to do the Computer Systems Concentration, specifically CS375 Compilers, as the next step in my adventure from higher level interpreted languages like Python, to compiled machine languages like C and Rust, to compilers themselves, and Operating Systems.