My name is Karim Adam Toufiq. I lived in Queens my whole life. My nationality is Mexican and Moroccan. My whole life I played sports. There’s never been a point in my life that I wasn’t playing a sport. Throughout all of my high school experience , I played football and I was a very successful player. I would be nothing in football without my coach. Coach Klein played a big role in my success as an athlete and a person. He taught me that, you don’t have to be the most gifted person in the game but rather be the hardest working. He really molded a strict work ethic in me. I began to implement my hard working mindset that was developed from football to my daily life. I didn’t want to be known just as an athlete, I want to be as well-rounded as possible. So I began studying hard in classes and tried new things.

My mother and I live in a one bedroom apartment with little to no space.We didn’t have money for fancy things but she tried her best to take care of me. Since I was a child I was obsessed with technology, one of my biggest dreams was to own my very own laptop. My mother never bought me a laptop cause we couldn’t afford it. In my junior year of high school, I worked while being a student athlete to get some money in my pocket and help out my mom’s bills. After over a year of working and saving, I saved enough money for a laptop. I went to BestBuy to purchase my first laptop. I started talking to one of the workers and I found out I literally knew nothing about laptops or tech in general. I needed to change that so I began searching for a class that can teach me the foundation of the tech world. I stumble across classes on Eventbrite. The company’s name is ‘The Knowledge House’. It was the summer of ‘19. It was everyday from 9-4 and they taught me the beginning steps to make a company. I learned how to design logos and basic HTML and CSS. My end assignment was to create a wireframe for a fictional tech company. I had two other members on my team and we worked on it together. At the end of the classes we had to present our project to a large auditorium. After that day, I knew what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. I’m still searching for the exact speciality in the tech field I want to pursue but I know I want to be involved in the tech world.

If I had to single out my two true passions it has to be powerlifting and technology. In order to pursue those two goals, I oriented my whole life around those two passions. For powerlifting, I train everyday and practice my form of three main exercise movements(Squats, Deadlifts, and bench ). For technology, I continue to immerse myself in class such as this ‘Writing for engineers’ to get closer to finding what I want out of technology.

Sincerely yours,

Karim Toufiq

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