Quote:From childhood I was interested in computers, but probably because of my ages, mainly because of games. When I was 12, father bought my first PC, it was considered as most powerful PC available at this moment. My father decided to distract me from the games and hired teacher with whom I learned MS-DOS. After year or two I get this sweet thing called “Internet” and my life totally changed. I became less interested in games and began to read various articles related to programming, IT and everything related to computer science.

After reading all this information flow, I decided to choose the direction of web-design. I have spent much time studying all kinds of PhotoShop tutorials, read all I could find about web-site layouts, acquainted with different people who had already achieved success in web-design. When I was fifteen I have excellent represent about what I want to do in the future, but I still wanted to read more about web-development.

While I collect information about development, I and my friends launched our first project called “Latvian Web-Designers Community”, and together with this project was launched the second one call “Latvia Web-Developers Community”, both they are closed already, but that was most popular projects in Latvian internet. These projects were done in the style of collective blogs where everyone can share their knowledge, tutorials, show their works. We had a connections between some design studios. We conducted various events, one of the event was called “Art Court” which
was held at the end of each week. The point of this event was that at the end of each week we choose the best in our opinion work which was sended to us, than we pass it to designers and they write their opinion about it. People really liked when professionals say them where they are wrong and how will be better. Same time I was administrator on another project, which is also for designers and which operates even this days, it is [link to this project], unfortunately, or maybe even thankfully I was separated from this project after some time.

Of course I always need to pay for domains, hosting/servers, etc. So I tried free-lance which gave me enough money to pay for this, and even more. Lets say it was enough to live normally. Than I caught myself thinking that “Design is just beauty – but I want to make web-pages alive”, yes, that was first time when I seriously thought about programming.

I was not really interested in making site layouts, it was kind a boring for me, maybe because I was to lazy to think about it more deeply. In those days were popular mIRC, chat client. There I met lots of peoples who helped me with PHP, MySQL and other. There was a lots of funny stories related to mIRC. I remember I had some problems with Apache, and I asked for help at #php channel, some guy told me that I need to open httpd.conf file find such a line and write down RTDM. I did this but nothing works, than I asked my friend, and when he saw this line he told that RTDM stand for Read The Damn Manual, that was funny, I was young and I did not talk a lot at English-speaking communities, obviously I did not understand their reductions.

Right now I can fluently use English. I love to use CodeIgniter framework for my projects, and I still remember how to code in pure PHP. I love to make web-page layouts. Not so long ago I discovered 960 grid system CSS framework, thanks to Nathan Smith, it's very easy to use and saves a lot of time. Also the near future we plan to launch a new project, which represents a browser based game.

From childhood I was dreaming about living and studying somewhere abroad. When I as in conscious age I started to compare universities in my country and abroad, and I came to conclusion that our universities can't offer required courses and worthy education. These conclusions were draw not only from my own observations, I also gathered information from my friends who study in the universities. I hope you'll like my personal statement and other points of my application.

Thank you.
Looking forward to read positive answer from you.