For some people, creativity is painting, for others it is dancing but for me, it is cooking. I was fortunate enough to find a medium that fostered my creativity at an early age. My experiences with cooking have provided me with concrete lessons that have built a strong foundation for me to succeed in computer science.

Cooking has been my creative outlet since an early age when my mom allowed me to help with small tasks around the kitchen. By fourteen, I leveled up from chopping vegetables to preparing entire meals and tackling complex recipes. The process I developed while working in the kitchen was to break a large recipe into smaller, individual tasks. This gave me the confidence to work on more complex recipes as breaking them down made them seem manageable. These lessons translate well for tackling complex software programs where the onus is on the programmer to break the program down into smaller components to understand and further modify it.

During my time at boarding school, I had to find inventive ways to pursue my love for cooking with a limited set of appliances and ingredients. My electric kettle became my best friend; I used it to make popcorn, then again to make masala chai with cinnamon and ginger swiped from the cafeteria. Using limited resources to formulate a solution is a skill that is applicable to Computer Science when dealing with resources like memory and CPU under contentious circumstances.

Cooking has been a transformative expression for me. It has taught me lessons that mesh well with the mindset required to program software systems. Through cooking, I have learned to divide complex problems into smaller manageable bits and find a solution using a limited set of resources. Armed with this knowledge, I feel confident that I will be able to tackle the academic and programming challenges that lie ahead.