A Wonderland of Code: My Journey into Computer Science Anonymous

For most Gen Z, computers and smartphones are inherent parts of life. However, I only gained an appreciation for the details behind the screens in the summer of ninth grade when I created a chatting program to exchange jokes with my twin sister in the next room. I found immense excitement in modifying my program to accommodate my wild (and sometimes silly) imaginings—playing laughter after jokes and encrypting texts so that only my sister and I could decipher them. This program was to me what the red pill was to Neo in The Matrix: in taking it, I began my journey into the Wonderland of CS.

Since then, my desire to explore real-world applications of coding has inspired me to initiate a number of programming projects, the most challenging being a financial model that predicts trading opportunities from market data. For months, I researched the Apache Commons Mathematics Library and Angular technologies to construct my application. Using these open-source libraries gave me invaluable experience in implementing complex features in a clear and modularized way; to give back to the open-source community, I uploaded my code to the GitHub repository for other programmers to use.

Additionally, as an English tutor for four years, I’m...