Hi Steemit! I am jpkrs and this is my story..

Hello fellow Steemit users! Welcome to my first of many posts - in this one I will be introducing myself and telling you a bit about my recent past and planned future. Enjoy!

My name is Jani Kraus and I was born in Germany in 1997. At the age of 5 my parents decided to move to South Africa where I did my 12 years of schooling. After my graduation in 2015, my family decided to move back to Europe due to the steady increase in crime during our stay in the country.

Not knowing what I wanted to do with my life (like most people coming out of their secondary education) I flew to Asia to take a gap year. My short-term plan was to become a certified kitesurfing instructor and teach the extreme-sport across Asia for a few months. I had been doing kitesurfing as a sport in South Africa for about 5 years prior to this. Upon arriving in Thailand, I travelled to the kitesurfing school where I was to do my teaching course. After receiving my certificate, I was given the opportunity to teach at that same school - Kiteboarding Asia (KBA) located in Pranburi.

I’m the high looking child on the far left.

A few weeks into my teaching, the school hired another 2 instructors from the UK (check them out on Instagram @that_kite_couple) who I became close friends with. A couple of months later I decided to join them in travelling to Kalpitiya, Sri Lanka. After spending some time in Sri Lanka, I decided it was time to head back home - largely dependent on the fact that I was struggling to sustain myself with the money I was earning.

Arriving back in Europe (Tirol, Austria) my parents pressured me into finding a university where I could study and leave the beach-boy life behind. At the time I was fairly certain that a career in software development would suit me well - I was wrong. Looking back, it has become clear to me that my intention to study software and information engineering was highly influenced by the fact that my dad studied this field and my inner urge to please my parents. So shortly afterwards I applied to the top schools in Austria and got accepted at TU Wien - the best technology university in the country, located in Vienna.

Fast forward 1 and a half years and I was at exactly the same place as after coming back from Asia. My life wasn't going as expected: 2 attempts at completing my first semester had failed and I still had no idea what to do with my life. The city life did not appeal to me and I found no joy in the course I had enrolled in. After only a few weeks in each semester I stopped attending classes and spent most of my days playing video games, hanging out with sketchy people and smoking a lot of cannabis. The consistent boredom and disapproval of my parents led me into blazing my days away and spurred a mild depression.

Coming from a wealthy family I never appreciated (probably still haven’t completely) the value of hard work. At school I was always lazy and never enjoyed putting in the hours of studying. Back then my parents would drag me to extra lessons after extra lesson so that I could achieve similar results to my 2 older siblings who both excelled. 2018 is going to be an interesting year for me, a year that I will try to improve on myself day by day. I have applied and been accepted to a Game Design school in the Netherlands and will hopefully start studying there in September – depending on if I believe it to be a good school after visiting their open day.

Until September I obviously have quite some time to kill. Currently sitting in Colorado, my father has given me the opportunity to work at his company (KGS) for a few months. My first project is coding a JAVA program that uses the SalesForce API to retrieve the company’s customer information and send out automatic receipt e-mails to these customers when their maintenance bill is due. Later this year, I will be going on a kitesurfing world tour visiting countries like Kenya, Madagascar, Mauritius, Morocco, Indonesia and more.

If you’ve come this far in my blog; firstly, thank you for hearing me out and I hope you can gain some insight through my experiences – like pursuing your parent’s dream will not lead you to happiness. I have always been very passionate about gaming and have played in many eSports teams throughout my youth – I even had a RedBull sponsorship at one time. I have decided to follow my dreams and pursue a career in something that has always fascinated me.

As for my Steemit page, I’m not entirely sure what kind of content I will be posting, but rest assured that it will cover a variety of topics ranging from gaming to game design to programming to travelling the world and kitesurfing. That concludes my #introduceyourself post. If you enjoyed reading the post I’d appreciate an upvote, any comments you have and of course give me a follow if you want to read more of my content in the future. Thank you!

Image taken by @that_kite_couple of me in Thailand.