## About Nathaniel Lybrand
## A Little About Me
My name is Nathaniel Lybrand, I am a IIT (Integrated Information Technology) major at the University of South Carolina (UofSC). I will be graduating in the spring of 2026 (a semester early).
## My Path
I started learning programming when I was in middle school. It was as simple as controlling a robot to move using RobotC, but I found it very interesting.
Once I got to high school, I was required to take at least one Computer Science class. In the class we learned how to build basic HTML and CSS webpages (similar to this one, but a little simpler).
I enjoyed it thoroughly, it was interesting that properly formatted text could build entire webpages.
At around this time, the COVID-19 Pandemic happened. Since school was essentially halted, I took it upon myself to learn in my own time. I thought that the HTML and CSS was too simple, so I decided to learn Python.
I thought that Python was much more interesting as compared to what I had been learning in school, so I immersed myself in learning how to work on my own projects.
At one point, I was spending upwards of 8hrs per day watching tutorials, and trying to write my own code. Usually my projects consisted of making simple games with PyGame. However, my ambitions eventually grew very large, and I tried to follow a tutorial about building self driving car AI.
This was too great a leap for someone like me, who had just started learning how to code. I quickly grew burnt out, and eventually gave up, with my enthusiasm regarding programming having been ultimately squashed.
Around this time school resumed virtually, my programming teacher encouraged me to continue learning, and I reluctantly agreed. Although I didn't feel quite as enthusiastic about programming for several months after, I did eventually begin to enjoy programming again.
I continued to take programming classes every year that I was in high school, though I didn't pursue learning outside of school as often as I did during the pandemic. Towards the end of my time in high school, I decided to work towards learning Computer Science outside of school in the same capacity as I was during the pandemic.
I originally focused on Cybersecurity, because I though that would be my major in college, but after spending hundreds of hours learning about internet security, encryption, and penetration testing, I found that I wasn't as interested as I had originally thought.
It was around this time that I started to learn about Data Science. I was introduced to Kaggle (a Data Science Platform) by a Youtube video. It was the first time I had as much fun programming as I had once had when I was first introduced to programming. In the last two years of high school, I spent most of my time learning about Data Science, and Machine Learning.
Now we are at the present, I chose the IIT major because I felt that I was lacking knowledge regarding the computer hardware, and how it's applied using programming. I still work on programming outside of college, as well as within, and you can find my projects on Kaggle, GitHub, and my Youtube Channel.