Tak's Mind

Let me give everyone a history of UIL Computer Science competition within Hutto High School.

It started my sophomore year, when I actually moved to Hutto

All through middle school I wanted to get to high school as fast as possible, and only for one reason, Computer Science. I wanted to code, to study it, to breathe it, to be surrounded by people who were exponentially better at it than I was to absorb their knowledge and wisdom. I was sick of being surrounded by people who were astonished (and then apathetic as the initial awe wore off) with what I could do instead of impressed, by people who couldn’t tell the difference between project’s I spent a virtually sleepless month on or a project that I whipped up in a half hour. People whom I tried to explain (as best as I could) the work and calculations that went into a piece of work  and could not give a better response than “Oh, that looks neat.”

In middle school I lost my father to the war in Iraq, in college and as a teenager my father also wrote code. The loss of this didn’t hit me until years later when I realised how isolated young programmers are and how close I would have been to him, people claim that we’re anti-social, or timid in public however that’s not the case at all. The truth is, we have a low tolerance for stupidity because of the culture we come from, a culture that exists “judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like.” -The Hacker Manifesto When were around people who are above average intelligence we’re suddenly the most social creatures society has ever encountered, spending virtually every waking moment with those people talking and working on projects which have no real profit or long term goal. Society forces us into isolation in childhood, we don’t choose it.

I heard a rumour that High Schools offered classes dedicated to Computer Science. I was ecstatic. Words cannot accurately describe the joy I felt, the people I invented in my head, programmers, hackers, people who spent as much time as I did writing code and knew much more about it than myself. I had dreams about it, I thought about it while I was laying awake at night with insomnia. I would walk in on my first day and naturally the first period I would enter was the Computer Science class, the teacher would be young and incredibly intelligent able to answer any question I could conceive of. The students would look over all the code I wrote throughout middle school and criticise it, however also respect me for it and immediately I would be accepted into their circle of friends.

Reality, is a hard pill to swallow without water. My first Highschool had a computer science class, however freshmen were not allowed entry, I knew only one other person in the school and that person was more social and friendly than I. Once more, I was isolated unable to make friends with anyone except for the social outcasts seemingly by choice. People were friendly, and genuinely seemed to want to be around me, I wasn’t ugly, and I wasn’t socially abnormal in my speech (besides the use of an extended vocabulary which I toned down for the other students). I just could not stand them, they talked for hours about nothing, when it came to politics they blindly repeated whatever their parents had told them, when it came to hobbies nothing involved mental stimulus. I was unable to make myself conform, when I tried I hated myself for it.

When we moved to Hutto, I dreaded the change. Another high school in which I will know no one, nor care to know anyone. Several things hit be like a ton of bricks.
1. No Computer Science course, what so ever.
2. No IB (International Baccalaureate) program, my credits didn’t count and I had to enroll on a distinguished plan instead.
3. It was a closed campus, in the previous high school, lunch was an escape, I ran to a LAN Cafe and talked with the tech savvy owners, now I was forced to eat alone.

I enrolled in as many tech courses as possible to attempt and compensate, they moved painfully slow in an attempt to give the slower children time to process the material, and I finished all the work for the year by the second semester, then worked on code. My teacher there told me about the UIL Computer Science Competition, and offered that I collect and train a team to compete.

About this of course, I was ecstatic. Finally an opportunity to prove what I can do, to compete with people in similar situations. By this point in time, I had actually bonded quite a lot with several students in HHS I was even considered popular, however that was only because I had a reputation for being a hacker which teenagers just eat up, though thats only because they don’t really understand what a hacker is, and only have what they’ve seen in movies to go on.

I met one or two other people who could code, they didn’t do it nearly as obsessively, and most of their time was poured into video games, however they could still code. Before this point, I had never met another programmer offline it was a massive relief to me knowing that I wasn’t completely alone there.

We got right to work, became extremely close, people started doing less gaming and more coding and we learned new things every day. The first competition finally rolled around, we entered the written portion. This is the point we realised we were totally unprepared, I forgot to write my answers down due to anxiety and the rest of the team failed. Not that it matters, HHS pulled us out and bussed us home before we even got to enter the programming section of the competition. We didn’t even have a chance.

All of us were upset, we didn’t know if it was poor planning, or if it was just the issues we had been dealing with our whole lives, no one understands, no one cares because they don’t understand.

We got right back on the horse, next year rolled around, and we recruited more members, trained harder, prepared longer, extended practice. The second competition came, one member never showed up to school (presumably anxiety) another member did not wake up to go (he said he looked at the clock and said “it’s too damn early” then went back to sleep.) another members parents booked him to go with them to Hawaii (he had told them, and reminded them about the competition a month in advanced, they were aware of it, once more the same problems surface.) I was there only with another soul member whom was completely unprepared, passed the written portion however could only help me with one of the programming problems (we made it that far this time.)

Still, we managed to place 3rd out of 4 completely handicap, still, inside we knew if our team would have been there we would have placed much higher.

We’ve worked all this year, I graduate high-school in June, this my my final competition tomorrow, and once more its completely fell apart.

We were alerted about the competition only a few days before it actually happened, a core member cannot get off of work to compete.
I have doubts one of the alternates will wake up for the competition.
I have doubts another alternate will show because of his girlfriend.
A teacher incorrectly entered a grade for another core member(he tried everything he could to fix it and it was an honest mistake, however the damage is done and irreversible.) – this disqualified another core member.
Another core member got fed up with doing 10 hours of busywork a week for a class he knew the material for, and simply stopped (To be honest I was tempted to go this route too, however can never bring myself to fail). He failed the class and was disqualified.

Once more, handicap, on the last event I’ll compete in, and not a soul realises how much the competition actually means to me, taken away, by the careless mistakes and procrastination of others.

I bet I won’t even get a sorry. That’s how people are, if they apologise it means they admit to having done something wrong, no one likes to do that, and its only a silly math competition or something.

“So it goes” – Kurt Vonnegut

I don’t want to, however I will still go to the competition, and I will still compete knowing that I once more will fail. I will go if no other reason than to say that I never gave up, that the apathy, and carelessness of others did not, has not, and will not break me.