When I was sixteen, I took a deep, full course in Maya: modelling, animation, rendering, and the rest of the tooling the software offered at the time. I sometimes describe it as a master because that is how comprehensive it felt, although it was really an early professional course rather than a university degree.
Maya was the first tool that made the computer feel less like an appliance and more like a material. I could model something, light it, animate it, destroy it, and start again. The work was slow and the machines were limited, but the basic idea was already there: a set of rules could produce an image, a space, or a movement that did not exist before.
I was not trying to become a 3D animator in any carefully planned sense. I was following the first tool that made me want to stay up and keep working. That mattered more than the title of the course.
This was also my first clear contact with a kind of thinking that would come back later in architecture, generative design, and software. I was learning that the result depends on the structure underneath it, not just on the surface.