Undergraduate / UC Prompt #1: Your World (thirty eight) - I've grown to become a programming "nerd" [7]

Describe the world you come from - for example, your family, community or school - and tell us how your world has shaped your dreams and aspirations.

Thirty-eight. Thirty-eight unique individuals in the graduating class of the school that I've attended since seventh grade whose interests range from theater to anime to League to Legends. I've grown up alongside most of my current friends since middle school and although we don't share all of the same interests, most of us love Java programming. Our Advanced Computer Programming class that we're taking this year is taught by a man who, like most teachers in my school, I've grown close to during high school. Mr. Berniker and I talk about the NBA and college all the time and he's genuinely interested about his students' lives and interests. Even though he's a teacher, I can tell him almost anything because I know that we'll be able to have a conversation about it without any awkwardness borne from the teacher-student relationship. For example, just recently I was talking to him about the Warriors-Clippers game and how that game showed the utter dominance of the Golden State Warriors.

In this class, I'm learning concepts that typically second-year college students learn: heaps, linked lists, graphs, stacks, queues, and more. I still can't believe that I have the opportunity to learn these concepts two years before a student normally would. The reason why the class was created this year was because my friends and I had already completed AP Computer Programming and wanted to continue learning programming. I didn't have to join a club or another group of friends to be able to share my interest with others because of the fact that my classmates are so diverse and all know each other well after at least four years of growing up together. Like my friend Sidh says, our friends are "STEM kids." Now, nearing the end of the one-semester class, I'm confident enough to ask Mr. Berniker to do HP Code Wars (an annual high school coding competition) problems from previous years alone rather than in groups like we do at Code Wars. I just love programming now; I'll make nifty yet simple programs in my spare time partly to refresh myself on old concepts and partly because it's gratifying to be able to make a computer do a task for you, such as displaying the times table. After one and a half years of programming, I've became a programming "nerd" thanks to Mr. Berniker's rigorous yet enjoyable class and I'm ready to learn even more in college and pursue my goal of becoming a software engineer.