Aaron Martinez

About

I was born in San Luis Potosi, MX and was brought to the United States when I was 6 years old. My interest in computers started in 4th grade when my teacher would bring in computer parts and do a show and tell. I found this fascinating and it stuck with me. I remember that in my Junior year of High School, I started looking at majors that I wanted to focus on. I remember that at that time I was still fascinated by computers eventhough it had been a few years that I took one apart. I decided to major in Computer Engineering mainly because it had the word computer in the name and I thought I would get to build computers. Boy, was I in for a surprise. I am lucky to say that this started me on my journey that I am still on.

Since I didn't have the GPA to get into a Universty after High School, I decided that I would attend a Junior College. I chose Ventura College because this was the closest JC that had a football team (which I played in HS, and wanted to continue with) and didn't look at what type of classes they offered. It wasn't until I was attending Ventura College and taking my General Education classes that I spoke to the Football counselor, which then directed me to the right counser that would guide me with the classes that I needed to take so that I could be able to transer. It wasn't all very straight-forward thought. To make a long story short, I did take the first two years of JC very seriously. I would take classes, and then drop them; I wasn't really putting my full effort in school. Rather, I was going out more to parties and working. A point came when I had to decide whether I was going to drop out of college and start working, or take school more seriously. The next three years of college started becoming more promising as I took classes seriously.

Transfering to Cal Poly SLO (the real Cal Poly) was a another whole experience in itself. I had another set of challenges when I got there. The first one was that I realized that I have never lived, for an extended period of time, in a town that is not pre-dominantly Hispanic. This was the first time that I had actually done that. It wasn't long before I started feeling home sick. Thinking back to that experience, I vividly remember feeling dirty or like I didn't belong in that town. I was able to overcome this partly by going home more often the first few months I was there. What really ended up helping though, was really getting involved with SHPE.

You would think that after overcoming this, I was all set and ready to go, right? It's funny how life works. I won't make this any longer, but I would say that I struggled all throughout my years at Cal Poly. I was on AP (no not Adance Placement, Academic Probation) for too many quarters. I would say that I never got used to the quarter system, and also I didn't have the best study habits. All to say, that I was able to graduate. It was one of my most challenging experiences and it formed and developed my character.

Now, I am currently working as a Software Engineer at Macy's. If you would like to know more about that go to the Work section of the site.