[emeraldhearts39]

I fell in love with computers under serendipitous circumstances -- I was pretty lucky that I went to the only hackathon near me in my freshman year of high school. I ended up loving it so much (I made a meme generator at the event) that I wanted to create a hands-on coding club at my school, which only continued to fuel my love for code as I found a community of young coders when I started my school's chapter of Hack Club. After the club began, my peers at my school and I finally felt like we had a group of students excited about code and its impact, leading us to create many coding initiatives in our relatively under-served community.

After us, 3 other Hack Clubs popped up, and it's been magical to see them hosting school hackathons and summer camps. I really hope that this continues so we can show more students what pushed us into the wild coding world!