← Back to articles

Saying bye to high school me.

2023-10-04 · 9 min read

In retrospect, my experience in high school was surprisingly unique.

I entered high school at a tumultuous time for everyone - it was 2021, we were out of the climax of the COVID pandemic, but we were in an awkward transition where schools were constantly switching between remote and not remote, depending on the casualties that would be on TV that week. I like to think it reflected all the worries and stresses I had at the time - constantly changing between cynicism and optimism, worrying about the widest variety of things (COVID? College? Returning back to in person? Helping my parents buy a restaurant and the economics of that?), but I think that's quite self-centered - the world doesn't revolve around one person, after all.

I grew up in Brooklyn, NY, where I went to elementary school and part of middle school. I'm listening to See You Again (Wiz Khalifa and Charlie Puth, 2017) ("We've come a long way from where we began / Oh, I'll tell you all about it when I see you again / Damn, who knew? / But something told me it wouldn't last / Had to switch up, look at things different, see the bigger picture") as I write this, and I do realize the irony of Spotify's AI, as so much happened during that period of my life.

In the middle of sixth grade, my family packed our lives into a broke-down 2013 Toyota Corolla and moved to a small town in Massachusetts, Chicopee, so we could own our own house instead of moving every year between the same two blocks because the landlord always had some sort of complaint.

I struggled a lot through middle school and felt extremely self-conscious - I was around people I didn't know, but more importantly, these people didn't want to know me. It was a really awkward phase of my life, but it was a necessary phase. I vividly remember one of my middle school teachers, whose husband was a software engineer, encouraging me to keep learning programming after I wrote an essay on it for an independent project, suggesting resources her husband had used. I remember my history teacher, Mr. DiCarlo, offering to buy me a $100 algorithms textbook after finding out about how much I enjoyed building stuff with code, two weeks before the pandemic started.

I think encouragement and support from these adults was the reason why I got really into programming during the COVID pandemic. It was, along with meditative activities like hiking and swimming and digging up clams, the most enjoyable part of the pandemic.

And it ended up changing my life. By "it", I reference the pandemic and all its aftereffects. By the time I returned to school, it was March 2021, meaning I was an actual freshman for about three months.

Sophomore year passed by in a blur. Everyone still wore masks, so nobody saw the lower half of people's faces. Recently, I was invited, along with a couple of friends, to a private screening of Dumb Money, which came out last week, a few weeks before it got released, and got to meet the writers behind the movie. If you haven't watched it, I highly recommend it - it's about the GameStop short squeeze of late 2020/early 2021, and while a lot of it is shock value, it was shockingly introspective for me and a majority of the audience. Can you believe that one and a half years ago, I was still wearing a mask eight hours a day? Can you believe that the GameStop short squeeze was two years ago? Can you believe that three years ago, on March 12, 2020, schools shut down for two weeks turned into three weeks turned into three months turned into a year?

Perhaps it's a human thing to want to structure your life around the big events when looking back. In that case, discovering a book on programming at my local library at the end of fifth grade was the first major event. Moving was the second. COVID was the third.

And Assemble was the fourth piece of the puzzle. On June 28 last year, at the end of sophomore, I signed up to attend Assemble after accidentally finding out about Hack Club, a nonprofit that not only helps high schoolers run coding clubs but more importantly runs other initiatives to help technical high schoolers meet people like them. For the first time in my life, I packed my bags, got on a plane alone, and flew across the country to San Francisco, where I had never been before. I touched my two feet on the West Coast. I met new people, and with these people, I walked (part of) the Golden Gate Bridge. I toured Chinatown and the Castro. I ate at In-And-Out. (For a full circle, I will be eating at the same In-And-Out in two weeks - I'll be going to San Francisco for a Maker Faire, which I've never attended before.) I got lost with some friends near the Tenderloin, which makes for a hilarious story to this day.

And some of these people are still my friends.

Last September, around this time, I started a Hack Club at my school. I stopped trying to hide the fact that I liked programming/doing geeky things that most of my peers generally wouldn't enjoy, and I felt so much freer, although the constraints of school were still there: what am I going to do about college? How do I stop falling asleep in AP Statistics? Over the course of my junior year, I started to feel like school was constraining me. The classes were challenging, but not taught in a particularly educative way. While I did relatively well in the context of school, I didn't enjoy a single bit of it and wondered if there was any alternative.

This summer let me discover that alternative. I came up to Vermont to intern at Hack Club for 2 weeks, I went to MIT for a summer program, and then I returned to Hack Club due to my rocky relationship with my mother which had reached an extreme climax I don't feel comfortable talking about (who I am now speaking with on formal terms). They took me in without any questions, and I will always forever be grateful to the people here for doing that. My life changed in the span of less than three months, and it wouldn't have been possible without the people who worked at Hack Club, including the people who have helped me through this entire situation.

Along the same lines, I spent a lot of my middle school years and high school years trying to find people I could "vibe" with, and I finally found those people this summer. From the first dinner together with said people, to watching 4th of July fireworks with said people, to blasting music in the car with said people at 3 AM on the way home from a trip to New York City, to getting lost on a mountain with said people at 1 AM. It helped me realize how unhappy I was in my previous environment - I wasn't happy in my school, and I was even less happy at "home" because of the aforementioned situation with my mother.

It's surprising to look back at all this time and count the amount of time I actually was attending high school - about 23 months - when the average amount is 40 months - and realize what I should have realized from the beginning - I'm a unique person with a unique situation and I should have been proud of that from the beginning. Spotify's AI is giving me 1-800-273-8255 (Logic, Alessia Cara, Khalid, 2017) ("It feel like my life ain't mine / (Who can relate? Woo!) / I've been praying for somebody to save me, no one's heroic / And my life don't even matter, I know it, I know it / I know I'm hurting deep down but can't show it / I never had a place to call my own / I never had a home, ain't nobody callin' my phone / They say every life precious but nobody care about mine"), which describes eloquently how I felt during middle school, and realizing that that's the growing up I needed to do. ("And when you stare at your reflection / Finally knowing who it is / I know that you'll thank God you did / I know where you been, where you are, where you goin' / I know you're the reason I believe in life / It can be hard / It can be so hard / But you gotta live right now / I don't wanna cry anymore / I wanna feel alive")

And the next step in growing up is to just put the past in the past, and part of that is getting my diploma. I remember thinking about the speech I was going to give at my graduation in June. It's crazy how things can change so quickly in three months, and while I do intend on going to college sometime in the next five years, I don't plan on attending next year. I want to experience what the world is now that I have that opportunity, and this is one last final goodbye to high school me. Thanks for fucking things up, and being brave, and going out of your comfort zone. It's going to stick to me for the rest of my life.

This was adapted from an essay I had to write explaining why I needed to get my high school diploma through alternative education.