Graduating High School

I gave a Valedictorian Speech during my high school graduation last week, on June 2nd.

I originally came to Benson Polytechnic High School to major in Computer Science. I’ve been coding since I was 12 and have loved tinkering with computers for as long as I can remember. And my high school of choice had a Comp Sci program, so it just made sense, right?

I ended up swapping my major after just one day, because I realized two things at about the same time. First, I already knew everything that a high school coding class had to offer. More importantly though, I was shy and nervous to talk to new people, and sticking in Comp Sci would be hiding behind something I was already comfortable with.

I majored in Radio Broadcasting instead, and while I’m certainly not going into radio (software engineering, here I come!), those communications skills will follow me wherever I go. It made me confident enough to get up in front of my whole class, their parents, and the faculty at graduation and give a speech — something that would have terrified me just four years ago.

Also during my time at Benson, a few of us realized that we didn’t have a school newspaper… so we just started one. A few friends and I also had the idea to start a podcast… so we recorded a hundred episodes of it.

Those are my favorite memories from high school, and they all had something pretty simple in common: you can just do things.

I swapped my major because I wanted to. We started the school newspaper because we realized nobody else was going to. My friends and I did the podcast just because we thought it’d be fun. Nobody assigned any of it to us. Nobody gave us permission. We just did it.

I think that idea — that you don’t need to wait for permission, that the thing you’re supposed to build isn’t going to build itself — translates pretty directly to software. You can just ship things. See what happens. The most valuable stuff I made in high school was never assigned to me, and I have a feeling that will carry forward into my career as well.

I’m so grateful for the knowledge and skills I gained at Benson and am incredibly excited for the future.