Why You Should Overdo It

As a very short and quick post: I often wonder where some of my inspiration comes from. Usually it’s my mom (very creative) and my dad (programmer-dad) or my brother or my previous advisors during undergrad. There are still some people from my high school that I think about.

One of them is Tony L. (he was of Basque ancestry and that’s why he was super interested in those politics (which weren’t otherwise really taught in class) in the history honors/AP course(s) I had with him), a friend who was in some of my honors/AP history classes.

Now, how it worked in my high school was that there was one computer science teacher (who, by the way, would hand-grade the Java assignments, which were timed and had to be printed out) teaching Intro and AP Computer Science (Java) and also C++. In other words, you could retake the Intro course to learn C++. I wanted to do that, but I did not. (Another side note: because I knew it existed and I felt like I had missed out, it inspired me to learn C++ for Rcpp.) You needed an A- or higher in the one-semester Intro course to be able to take the AP course, which, I remember, started on day one with writing classes in Java.

There were some people who had taken the Intro/AP CS courses in 10th/11th grade and would “help out” / “advise” the “cohort” taking the same sequence in 11th/12th grade. One of those people I’m still friends with: she ended up working as a programmer at Bridgewater Associates for a very long time and she is still a very nice person.

Then there was Tony, who was in my first-period AP European History course senior year (12th grade) (which had ~30 students, that either went off to prestigious schools or to Rutgers (now ranked #14 in Public Universities)) (and we were all listening to “Franz Ferdinand” in our iPods before class started). He had finished the AP Computer Science sequence earlier (10th/11th grade) and, for one of our final presentations at the end of the semester, made a Java GUI for a Jeopardy game with questions and answers (I believe it was for the AP Euro final exam), which he presented to the class.

I still remember that, because there was some use of GUIs in the AP CS course, using BlueJ and some fish aquarium, something like that, but we never officially learned it in class. In order to really learn Java GUI building, you had to learn it from textbooks, on your own, on your own time.

But my point is that he had gone above and beyond what he learned in the AP CS course: in his own time, he learned more Java (and GUI programming) and was able to, by himself, write a Java GUI for a Jeopardy game that he presented to the class (he connected his laptop to the TV).

I don’t know what he’s doing now. I tried to look for him on LinkedIn but could not find his profile. His other friend from my high school is a longtime Silicon Valley programmer (CMU undergrad), so maybe he is also there.

I still think about this because it is worth it to do things like that, for many reasons:

1. You force yourself to do something new and challenging (having taken AP Computer Science and using it to build a UI for AP European History).

2a. Your classmates are watching you (it inspires them (or the right people) and it shows them there’s more out there).

2b. You had to have been a certain person with certain pre-reqs (I was taking AP CS) to understand what was going on (Java GUI was built) & how difficult that was.

3. You are raising the bar on the status quo.

The summer between the end of high school and college, I ended up going through a “Programming Sudoku” book I bought with my mom at a bookstore, which showed how to write a Sudoku GUI in Java, because I had seen Tony’s example in my AP Euro class.

As another side note/story, there was another student in my first period AP Euro class, who would raise his hand to answer the teacher’s question, when picked on, go up to the front of the class, take the chalk from the teacher, draw either a map of Germany on the board or pull down the map and with a ruler, go over a century’s worth of history for like 5-10 minutes. I had only seen that again in college with my friend in my plant biotech classes, and as I became more friends with him, I would wait for that to happen (i.e. “oh, here he goes again”) and then I realized he would do that because he was just bored. And then I saw this again in my iGEM team, in fact. I selected for it, I selected those people in the “pre-team” that would do things like this to be my final team members and board members.

As another side note, the reader may ask, what was I “overdoing” in my AP Euro class. I had figured out that I could type up my notes from the textbook, use text-to-speech to generate an mp3 file that I could then put into my iPod and listen to that and I would do that. Now I use Claude which has a pipeline setup on my server that does this for me (see plappa: https://plappa.me/).

You should overdo it.