He remembers his mom freaking out.

Scattered around the computer room of their Omaha home were the guts and parts of the family’s first desktop computer.

He was just 12. The computer, a Macintosh, had cost his parents about $3,000.

“I took it apart just to see if I could put back together,” says Ryan Grandgenett, who’s 21 now and a junior studying computer security at UNO’s College of Information Science and Technology.

And he did put it back together.

“Every since I was little, I’ve always been taking things apart and putting them back together,” he says. “As soon as I could use a computer, I was always playing with them, trying to figure out how they worked.

“I grew to really love them.”

Find out how Ryan is being rewarded for that love.