In art class, while most students dreaded the period and stayed home, I was the one who always showed up early — not because I was talented, but because something about it made me feel free. It took me years to understand why.
Growing up, I was surrounded by a family that valued science and medicine above everything else. My father is a cardiologist and my mother holds a nursing degree — discipline and precision were the language of our home. I excelled academically, graduated high school in the science track with a GPA of 91, and was expected to follow a path paved in logic and formulas. And for a long time, I tried to.
But art class was different. While other students saw it as a burden, I saw it as the one hour in the day where I didn't have to follow a formula. I didn't understand it at the time, but looking back now, I realise what it gave me: the freedom to create something from nothing, and the feeling that not everything has to have a right answer.
The hit that doesn't kill you makes you stronger.
In 2015, a friend came to me with an idea: open a YouTube channel, film our daily lives. We were just kids, but we planned it seriously, wrote our first script, and published a video. The response from our families wasn't what we hoped — we were told to take it down. Most people would have stopped there.
I didn't. That summer I discovered Minecraft, and with it, video editing. I opened a channel called A39arGamer, uploaded around 11 videos, and went to sleep genuinely happy with 39 subscribers. Looking back at that channel today, what I remember is not the numbers — it's the obsession. The hours spent learning Sony Vegas, Audacity, FL Studio, recording and re-recording, trying to make something that felt like mine. That feeling never left.
Year after year, I kept building. By 2022, in my final years of high school, I taught myself DaVinci Resolve — not from a class, but out of curiosity, because I knew it was the industry standard for film and television colour grading. I convinced my department to let me help produce presentations and short videos for school events. I was learning how cameras worked, how sound could manipulate emotion, how the cut between two frames could change the meaning of everything.
At the same time, I had one eye on software I couldn't yet afford. I remember trying — and failing — to convince my father to buy Adobe tools. What I eventually did to get access shows you how badly I wanted it. That desire didn't come from wanting to impress anyone. It came from a quiet, persistent need to make things.
In 2023, I made the most difficult decision of my academic life: I paused every creative project I had and dedicated myself entirely to high school finals. The result was a 91 average, and with it, a dream — studying filmmaking, media, and directing.
When I told my family, they said no. Completely. I was pushed toward engineering, a field I had no passion for. I enrolled in JUST University in Jordan for a semester — studied, survived, but felt like I was disappearing. Then a transfer acceptance came for Software Engineering at UDST in Qatar. I took it, still feeling like something was missing.
A year and a half later, I walked back to that same conversation with my parents. This time, they listened. This time, I was ready.
I am not applying to this program to collect a degree. I am applying because everything I have done since I was ten years old — every channel I opened, every video I edited in the middle of the night, every frame I studied from a Nolan film — has been pointing here.
I bring proficiency in Adobe Premiere, Photoshop, After Effects, DaVinci Resolve, audio tools, and programming languages. I bring experience as a certified hockey referee — someone who makes high-pressure decisions under scrutiny. I bring a genuine curiosity about how media shapes political opinion and public truth. I bring a family that pushed me so hard toward logic that I had to learn, on my own, that creativity is its own form of intelligence.
Art class was my first teacher. Everything since has been practice. The DCMP program is where I intend to turn that practice into a profession — and leave something behind that matters.