Anecdotal evidence to the contrary: I was from an unprivileged background growing up in a dying blue collar steel town outside of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania that

Anecdotal evidence to the contrary: I was from an unprivileged background growing up in a dying blue collar steel town outside of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania that used to be the company town for ALCOA. I was that one weird kid that was really into computers instead of football like everyone else. I taught myself C++ programming, OpenGL, and matrix math in high school because I wanted to develop 3D games. I convinced my high school principal to let me enter a flight simulator that I wrote during summer break of sophomore year into the Pittsburgh Regional Science Fair (at my own expense), and I won. I remember standing on stage sticking out like a sore thumb from the usual snooty, upper class high schools that everyone knew from around the area. That day, I met a robotics professor at CMU who was one of the judges, and that introduction, along with sending a DVD video of my work to a few top universities with my college application ended up changing my life.