From Chatting Apps to Voice Analysis: My Journey into Computer Science Anonymous

To most Gen Z, life without internet or smartphones would be like life without food: (practically) impossible. However, I only gained an appreciation for the details behind the scenes in the summer of 9th grade when I created a chatting program to exchange jokes with my sister in the next room.

Through subsequent days of coding and online courses, I became fascinated by the complex yet elegant way that the Internet functions under the hood. I found immense excitement in modifying my program to accommodate my wild (and sometimes silly) imaginings—enabling it to play laughter after my favorite jokes and scrambling texts with a self-devised encryption that only my sister and I could decipher. Looking back, this chatting app was to me what the red pill was to Neo in The Matrix: by taking it, I began my journey into the Wonderland of computer science.

The following year, I took all of the AP computer science classes offered at my school and initiated several coding projects outside of the classroom to further explore CS. For my biggest project, I devoted months of research and coding to create a stock-options model that clearly displays the patterns in seemingly chaotic financial market data. In addition to using Java and Angular...