U of Southampton is my dream!

My name is Steven Patrick O’Riley, Jr. and I’m a 18 year-old H.S. Senior just a few months away from graduating from the Indiana Academy for Science, Mathematics, and Humanities High School, Muncie, IN with a 4.3 GPA and 35 college credits. The I.A. is ranked as the #1 H.S. in Indiana and #3 nationally.

I was recently accepted into the University of Southampton, ranked sixth out of all British universities for computer science, and additionally ranked as one of the best overall colleges in the world. However, I am currently unable to accept this offer because I cannot afford it, and not by a long shot.

So I am here to ask for what I know is a miracle. I am asking for your financial support so that I can study at a college that will fulfill my dreams and aspirations. And, one day, I can do the same for someone else.

Since the age of ten I’ve been programming things like game engines, string lexers, math parsers, and neural networks. Over the course of nearly eight years’ time, I’ve created 100+ unique and extensive projects (located on my GitHub page) including: a web implementation of Super Mario World, a self-assessment-based quiz maker, a Recurrent Convolutional Neural Network which simulates how humans compare two objects, a server-side economics game which applies locally recursive choices to the optimality of all clients, and many more.

For a great amount of time, I have dreamed of becoming a lifelong computer scientist and working alongside other programmers to come up with new ideas, build new things, and develop new fields. My end goal is to ensure that whoever I work with is satisfied with my capabilities and my work, and that whatever I work towards will not be deemed as just another 'thought experiment.'

I’ve been successful in creating so many things because there is no cost required to implement one's own ideas from scratch. An idea is not something that can be bought or sold, and the monetary value on software is secondary to its utility. But sometimes, and with a lot of luck, these two factors can correlate with one another, and suddenly a hobbyist computer programmer is able to become a full fledged computer scientist.

Thank you for your consideration of supporting my dream to attend the University of Southampton in the Fall of 2017.

For more information about my work and I, check out these links:

http://sporiley.com

http://github.com/stevengeeky

Note: All donations fundraised via this GoFundMe campaign will be used for the purpose of sponsoring my tuition and misc. expenses to attend the University of Southampton, England. In the event that I'm unsuccessful at fundraising the total amount required to attend, all monies fundraised will be used instead to sponsor my tuition and misc. expenses to attend Indiana University's School of Informatics. If you have questions or wish to receive a financial report of how the total monies fundraised were expensed at the close of this campaign, please contact me via email