Strong Work Ethic

Essay 1: My parents did not grow up with much, but have made a good living because of their strong work ethic. They both work in financial services, my father in tax, and my mother in information technology. For as long as I can remember they have been trying to instill that same work ethic in me and my sister.
From a young age I was very sociable. My family called me the Mayor because of my habit of introducing the family to strangers seated near us in restaurants. That sociability helped me in pre-school and kindergarten, as I never had any trouble making friends. As I got older, my interests grew to include Pokemon, legos, video games and athletics. I enjoyed video games, because they are a constant challenge that provide entertainment,
I went to a camp where we got to make our own lego video games. They were games like those in arcades where the main character proceeds to the right of the screen the entire time, fighting off enemies. It was nowhere near as complex as the actual lego video games that were sold at stores, but it was something to call my own.
I thought switching schools would be a tough experience, but I instantly liked the middle school I went to. My sixth grade math teacher furthered my liking of math. I was a top student in his class, and he liked me a lot. We would often play a math game called 24 at the end of class, and since I often won, I found myself walking out of the classroom with pockets full of candy.
In seventh grade, I was named Student of the Month, and it was my math teacher that nominated me for that award. It entailed being a good student, while being helpful to others. I joined the Math Team, and in eighth grade I placed highest among my school team at the Christian Brothers Academy (CBA) Math Competition, a difficult competition among both public and private
The goal was to help guide us to possible majors for college. I learned a lot about myself. A theme of the output was that I am solutions-oriented, logical, and investigative. Given that I have always excelled in Math, these adjectives seemed consistent with that. I know I am good at analyzing a problem and coming up with the possible solutions. An example of this is an assignment I had in my Computer Science Class. Our final project was coding a circuit that we had previously created. Since, I love music, I decided to code the circuit to be a jukebox and play different tunes. First, I had to wire a circuit that involved a few buttons, a speaker, and an LCD. Then, I had to write a program that would list the songs and their corresponding buttons on the LCD, and then play songs as buttons were pressed. In order to code the songs, I had to figure out the tempo of the song, along with the sequence of the notes that were involved in it. A challenge I encountered on the way was that I could not find sheet music for two of the songs, and so, I had to code the notes by trial and error, listening for each note to see if it synced to the note of the song. Coding that circuit, while frustrating at times, was also incredibly satisfying in the end when I got it to do what I wanted it to do. I really liked the feeling of accomplishment in solving the problem and having an end product as a result