So, you're probably thinking,

"This isn't Tom's normal backdrop."

And you would be right.

So this week, I'm actually in Portland, Oregon,

staying with my friend, Chase, and this is his

much cooler office than mine.

He's letting me use for a while.

And this week, I wanted to do a video

to follow up on last week's video

which went over that whole passion versus experience

and skills debate.

And I kind of just want to augment that video,

which is more general discussion,

with my own experience,

how I got to where I am today

and how I became a YouTuber.

Not a lot of people have done like these

"My You Tube" story videos, and they're really cool.

I like to watch them for the people

that I enjoy watching,

but I want to frame mine in the context of

how I got to here from where I was

as a student early on in my college career

and near the end of high school,

and kind of like show how my major selection,

which was totally different than

what I'm doing now,

progressed into me being a full-time YouTuber.

So, and I'm like away from home, so I don't have

access to my full computer,

but if I have pictures online, I'll kind of like

throw them up in here and kind of like

make the story a little bit more visual.

So, let's go back to like high school.

Um, actually, I'm going to go back a little bit

further than that.

Because my major selection was really, really different

than being a YouTuber.

I didn't go into film,

I didn't go into communications or journalism

or anything like that.

I went into a major called Management Information Systems.

And this is basically like the IT guy major.

So like if you think of the guy who's running

all the networks and systems at a big corporation

or like the dude who runs the computers at your school

and makes sure the computer labs are set up,

like that's what I wanted to be.

I grew up watching The Matrix, and like my

favorite character was Tank, the dude who had like

15 monitors and all the scrolling

text coming down.

And I wanted to be that.

I wanted to run all these systems

because when I was I think 12 years old,

I wanted to make a website.

And I found this site called like

Yahoo GeoCities, where you could drag and drop

elements onto a page,

and it was basically like Power Point.

So I made a website for like a favorite band of mine,

and it was terrible, it looked really terrible

and eventually, I was like so fed up with it

that I wanted to start changing things,

and the drag and drop editor wouldn't let me do it,

so I had to figure out how to start coding my own websites.

And I was reading tutorials and like these

super old websites.

One was called like Web Monkey I think,

and I just kind of learned HTML and CSS

and a lot of the other languages that like the web

is built upon,

and I was having fun building my own websites.

And I kind of put that aside for a while,

but then during my junior year of high school,

I met a friend in a math class,

and we got to talking about web design

because he said that he knew how to code,

and I was like, "Well, hey, dude, I also know how to code.

"Why don't we set up our own business

"and charge people to build websites?"

So that was actually what we did,

and right after high school ended,

I had like, I had so much trouble finding a summer job

because I was not yet 18,

and I was also going off to college,

so nobody wanted to hire me.

So we just went out and found clients

and built websites for them.

And sort of built this love of computers.

And the reason I went into Information Systems

rather than like computer science or computer engineering

is because Information Systems is more of a mix

between business and computers.

And the reason I loved the business is because

when I was a junior or maybe even a sophomore,

I can't remember the year now,

but I joined a club called

Business Professionals of America at my high school.

I basically did it because I needed stuff

to put on my resume for college applications.

But it was fun, and we got to go to these

like state conferences,

where we'd stay in a hotel,

and we'd have to do competitions,

and the competitions I entered were like

HTML coding and web design.

I did a business plan competition, which kind of

like got my appetite whetted for entrepreneurship,

and I ended up running for state office

and got elected as the state treasurer,

which let me travel to a different state,

I went to Reno and Nevada,

I went to the national conference,

and it was super cool,

and I was kind of getting these ideas in my head

that maybe someday I wanted to be

an entrepreneur or at least do something

involving business,

but I also wanted to kind of meld

technology into that with computer stuff.

So MIS it was.

I ended up declaring my major early in college.

I think most people declare their majors two years

after they start college,

so after their junior year starts.

But I ended up declaring my major

during my sophomore year, and I started getting

into these classes,

and right away on campus I got a job

at the campus tech support center,

so I got to learn how to remove viruses

and basically how computers worked like from the ground up,

and it was really cool.

And that led into an internship,

where I worked at a Fortune 500 company,

and I worked in the network department.

And this is kind of where things started to shift.

Because my preconceived notion of

the networking department was that I would a dude

who would like be wiring up servers

and hauling cable around this gigantic corporate campus

and I'd be able to kind of go through all

the secret tunnels

and be all over the place all day long.

And I'd always wanted to find a well-paying job

that was technical and like intellectually challenging

but also physically challenging.

I didn't want to be in a cubicle all day.

So I got this internship, and it turned out to be

nothing but cubicle work.

I was like in a box 40 hours a week,

just changing like configuration settings in servers.

And what I learned actually,

and this is what I elude to in the end of the video,

you kind of have to learn what you don't like to do

as well as what you do like to do.

What I learned is I really don't

like maintaining things.

I like to create things.

I had almost no opportunities to create things in that role.

It was all maintenance,

and it was all sitting in the cubicle, and it was like

almost a prison sentence to me.

The co-workers were cool,

like they gave me a lot of opportunities,

and I hate to say, but like the work itself

ended up being almost like a prison sentence.

Which kind of motivated me further

to keep working on College Info Geek.

So go back like a year before

that internship started,

I got a summer job on on campus,

and I don't really know what to call this job,

because they called us cyclone aides

since Cy is the mascot of Iowa State University

where I went.

I'm just going to call it like

student orientation assistant.

Basically, my job was to give tours of the campus

to other students and parents

and help them sign up for classes,

and also answer any and all questions people had

about the college and about the like experience

of going to college itself.

So I was learning all this stuff,

and the same time I was reading blogs like

Life Hacker and other things like that,

and there was this one like college-specific blog

that I was a huge fan of.

And near the end of my freshman year,

they actually were hiring some new writers,

so I applied, but I got rejected.

And I had like this whole application and I had written

this whole post for them

as part of that application,

and I didn't want it go to waste,

so I just figured I would put up my own blog.

And was just like another one of these attempts

to kind of like bolster my resume

and have a personal project that'd look good to employers,

and I just soft of did it for fun

for like a full year until right around the time

I did that internship a year later.

One of my posts kind of blew up

and got shared all around the web,

and since I was like hating that job so much,

I decided to pour all of my time into

trying to make this website as big as it possibly could be.

And it was just writing at first,

but I actually ended up finding out

that I liked to write,

and there was a lot of creativity in it.

I got to create things, I got to share things

with people and help people out,

and I found out that was much more conducive to

my personal traits than changing configurations

in servers in a cubicle for 40 hours a week.

So that's what I ended up doing like

all throughout college.

Whenever I had free time, I would work on articles,

and I would soak up as much knowledge

as I possibly could from people like

mentors of mine and people who I looked up to.

And eventually, I found out that I was

really liking to listen to podcasts

when I was at the gym or driving,

and I found out I was

like listening to podcasts more often

than I was reading blogs,

maybe a couple of years after I had started the blog.

So at the beginning of 2013, I was like,

"I can start my own podcast,"

and that is exactly what I did.

I started the College Info Geek Podcast,

which you can find down in the description

for this video.

And then I think it was like

middle of 2014, the same thing happened again

where I noticed like I'm watching a lot of

YouTube videos.

I'm not reading very many blog posts anymore.

I'm listening to fewer podcasts,

and I'm putting a lot of my time into YouTube

for whatever reason.

And I found creators like Caddicarus ,

my friend Satchell Drakes,

and my friend, YoungTown,

like I was watching video game channels

because I really liked video games,

but I was also really fascinated

with how they edited their videos

and kind of like put it all together

and I was really curious about how all that worked,

so just like with pod casting, I figured