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07/15/2015 08:00 AMNot your typical college student, 19-year-old North Haven native Aaron Shea is way ahead of his game in more ways than one.
As a University of Hartford freshman studying computer science, Aaron was asked to demonstrate his 3D gaming programming accomplishments during a technology fair for the university, which in turn secured him a $7,000 grant from gaming technology company Epic.
Aaron caught Epic’s eye by his tweaks to the company’s open-source game engine Unreal. The cherry on the cake? Aaron also made the dean’s list both semesters of his freshman year while holding down a part-time job.
Was the tech world always Aaron’s calling? Yes, says his mom Cheryl, and Aaron agrees.
“Mostly I can thank my dad [George] who brought home an adventure [computer] game when I was seven years old. It was fascinating to me, and I started thinking about how it functioned, and how someone could make something like that.”
Then at age 10, Aaron’s fascination with building his own world inside a game began to take a serious turn.
“I started getting more into how could I build my own game,” he says. “At that age I didn’t know what I was doing and didn’t know anyone who knew that sort of thing.”
Aaron was like a sponge, though, picking up everything from any resources he could find.
“I could learn to figure it out.”
Then, Aaron says, “I went down two different paths at once. I was interested in games, but it was hard to find stuff about that since it was so new—it’s still rather new, we still don’t know where it’s going. I then also started looking at websites, designing and developing those things as well, which actually led to my first job a few years later.”
That first job was a position Aaron landed while still a senior at North Haven High School. Aaron says he sent Digital Surgeons, a New Haven based digital marketing company a letter and convinced them to allow him to apprentice after school.
After his apprenticeship ended, Aaron spoke at a developer meetup group in New Haven, “and it went really well.”
The talk impressed his boss, who soon after told Aaron he wanted to hire him, “A very exciting moment,” says Aaron.
Aaron was offered a part-time position doing back-end development work for the company, as his schedule permits. He’s still the youngest employee there, he says.
Before heading off to college, Aaron also volunteered his skills and talents to build the current North Haven Education Foundation website. That wasn’t his first effort to boost his hometown’s education opportunities— as a freshman at North Haven High School, he spoke at Board of Education meetings to bring back computer science classes, which he says were cut for a time.
Coming up for Aaron besides his current Unreal programming project is another talk on July 30 for www.newhaven.io (the New Haven-based web development meet up group], which will be held in the evening at Digital Surgeons.
In Aaron’s free time, he enjoys playing trumpet in his dad’s band, Furious George, around North Haven and surrounding areas and speaks highly of his music classes at North Haven High School.
To nominate a Person of the Week, contact Jaki Lauper at j.lauper@shorepublishing.com.