During my freshman year my social media accounts were breached after an incident in an online community. I felt violated and threatened and it was a rought period for me. But it really woke me up and got me thinking about my privacy. I absorbed a few articles on computer security and anonymity; learned about Tor and participated in privacy advocating communities. It was then I learned about an emerging threat model; mass surveillance. Back then, the discussion was based on limited publicly available data, namely EP's report on ECHELON interception system and The Spy Files by Wikileaks.

I got interested in the subject and found myself organizing available information under a document that over the period of two years grew to a book on surveillance and on how to protect myself online. Along the way I swapped my major to computer science. Then came the harship; failure in operational security led to me losing all my research; I knew the strength of modern encryption, and without my keys... I threw in the towel. This was in May 2013. Four weeks later, the Snowden revelations started pouring in, proving the issue was important enough to fill the front page of every news paper worth mentioning, for months. It also rendered everything I had learned about state surveillance obsolete.

I got a fresh start. I absorbed the leaks and hundreds of news articles about them. Everything I learned implied I was going to be right about advances in threat model (and it turns out I was) -- governments now aim to hack the computers of everyone, especially if you're important or suspicious. Turns out the Snowden revelations implied everyone from systems administrators and cryptographers to those who design security products are important enough to end up on a watch list. The possiblity of that hasn't stopped me learning crypto, computer security, programming, and developing high assurance communication systems that can balance the existing power structures.

So that sort of answers the question how I discovered what I wanted to do with my life; the issues I want to solve. Initially I didn't plan to have an impact, I wasn't going to publish my "book". As I grew with the issue it I realized I could have an impact -- I could pioneer a long term solution to secure communication by limiting the time-frame when remote attacks are possible.

/u/dawkins3 has a point, but having desire to change the world doesn't require a degree or minimum amount of IQ/muscle mass; You grow and learn as you go, I know I have.