The Beginning of My Computer Love Affair
Hello my name is Tranicia Rubin. I am currently a high school fashion teacher going to Lone Star in hopes of a change in career. I will be married in less than 157 days and want to have more flexibility once we start a family to work remotely or the option of telecommuting several days a week. It’s not just the schedule that attracts me to a career in web and mobile app development though. I fell in love with computers in 3rd grade when my teacher Mrs.Gibbs foreshadowed that learning to type was a necessity. It was just as important as learning to write legibly. She would have us pop in a game on the floppy discs on the big, bulky Apple computers and tape paper over our fingers. We were tested on our typing ability and speed the entire year. Did I mention that this was 1997? The average American household did not have a personal computer nor could many afford it. It was the years of the .com boom but was it just a trend? My teacher, a Venezuelan woman, who wore her black silky hair in a tight bun secured with a pencil, foreshadowed that 8 year olds would need to know how to type and navigate a computer to be productive, successful citizens.
My father, a store manager, at Sams Club also made sure I was exposed to the technology of the future. My next year, in 4th grade, he purchased PCs for the house. He got a great deal on a white bulky Compaq computer and monitor with dial up internet for my room! It was just the beginning of this journey into computing! I would stay up for hours and hours talking to people from foreign lands in AOL chat rooms and getting help from online tutors for school projects.The ability to communicate with people outside of just the landline telephone or meeting face to face would be the basis of the internet and lead to eventual rise in this millennium. I somehow knew that and relished in possibilities of learning about things beyond what I could see or touch in person. I thrived with the emergence of a search engine to find out the answer to anything I wanted to know about on web pages that were rudimentary at the time but top of the line in my eyes. My father’s trust in me to explore the hardware side of the computer is mind boggling now that I look back on it. The computer started to run slower and we figured out that we could add more memory to the computer tower to allow it to run faster. I searched online for the instructions and he allowed me, under his watch, to open up the computer and locate the location to add more memory. I followed the necessary instructions on installing it and like magic, the computer speed increased and I had more memory!
Today's students may never understand that growing up in the 90s was a decade of possibilities and opportunities. My 3rd grade teacher and father understood and knew that. I let my love for technology be taken over by the fashion bug and earned a degree from LSU in Textiles, Apparel Design, and Merchandising with a concentration in Apparel Design. My love of technology has always been at the forefront. I worked in the fashion industry in many capacities for a few years and became a fashion design teacher. Now I’ve revived that curiosity again and look forward to this new endeavor at Lonestar!
My father, a store manager, at Sams Club also made sure I was exposed to the technology of the future. My next year, in 4th grade, he purchased PCs for the house. He got a great deal on a white bulky Compaq computer and monitor with dial up internet for my room! It was just the beginning of this journey into computing! I would stay up for hours and hours talking to people from foreign lands in AOL chat rooms and getting help from online tutors for school projects.The ability to communicate with people outside of just the landline telephone or meeting face to face would be the basis of the internet and lead to eventual rise in this millennium. I somehow knew that and relished in possibilities of learning about things beyond what I could see or touch in person. I thrived with the emergence of a search engine to find out the answer to anything I wanted to know about on web pages that were rudimentary at the time but top of the line in my eyes. My father’s trust in me to explore the hardware side of the computer is mind boggling now that I look back on it. The computer started to run slower and we figured out that we could add more memory to the computer tower to allow it to run faster. I searched online for the instructions and he allowed me, under his watch, to open up the computer and locate the location to add more memory. I followed the necessary instructions on installing it and like magic, the computer speed increased and I had more memory!
Today's students may never understand that growing up in the 90s was a decade of possibilities and opportunities. My 3rd grade teacher and father understood and knew that. I let my love for technology be taken over by the fashion bug and earned a degree from LSU in Textiles, Apparel Design, and Merchandising with a concentration in Apparel Design. My love of technology has always been at the forefront. I worked in the fashion industry in many capacities for a few years and became a fashion design teacher. Now I’ve revived that curiosity again and look forward to this new endeavor at Lonestar!
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