Senior Chase Odgers plans to turn his hobbies into a career.

He wants to become an electrical engineer and work on the hardware side of computers. Already, he enjoys working with Arduino, an open source electronics platform, and helps care for his turtles by using computers.

Odgers uses his hobby and knowledge of computers to turn on and off the lights for his turtles. He had also hoped to feed them with computers.

“I kind of gave up on it because it was too time consuming,” Odgers said. “But I got it to the point where I could turn off and on my turtles’ lamps and that was about it.”

Odgers started learning about computers because his dad also messes around with computers. He was young when he started and kept learning about them through classes, taking things apart and putting them back together and consulting YouTube.

“I got involved with computers when I was very little,” Odgers said. “We had an old computer that I took apart, and I really liked messing with that. So it kind of grew from there, and I just started YouTubing stuff.”

He used what he learned and built his own computer from scratch.

“It’s not that big of a project,” Odgers said, “but it’s probably the one that took the most money to complete.”

Odgers enjoys messing around with computers and looks forward to making this his career. He wants to create the parts for computers.

“I’m going into electrical engineering,” he said. “I just enjoy playing with them — that’s kind of my little hobby.”

Engineering teacher Charlie Lauts said she sees him going places.

“He will be an engineer working in computers — designing stuff we don’t know exists,” Lauts said.