Backstage by Salma

Backstage by Salma - July 2021 Scholarship Essay

人群怒吼with applause as the stage lights dimmed and the scene ended. That was my cue to bring on the chair for the next scene. In fact, that chair was my only responsibility as a freshman stage crew member on our high school’s reproduction of Chicago. To most, going to two-hour play rehearsals 4 or 5 times a week to move a single chair on and off stage once might sound like a bore. But it wasn’t moving that chair that kept me wanting to go to the rehearsals. Instead, it was being behind the scenes that excited me. Fixing broken props, stitching up costumes, and solving all the disasters behind the scenes while the audience watched a seemingly smooth and perfect show was something I loved.
I always yearned to understand the inner workings of everything. Thinking back to middle school, I was always the quiet kid in the back of my class. That was partly because I was shy, but mostly, I enjoyed picking up on things nobody else did. I loved understanding the inner workings of my own classroom, like when I would hear the teachers talk in the hallway and listen to the gossip in middle school, never letting myself get involved. I had always wondered why I loved this so much. And my sophomore year of high school, it finally clicked.
“I hate computer science.” That was my first thought as I walked out of my Intro to Computer Science class on the first day of my sophomore year. That first day, I walked in, knowing I would know virtually nobody. There were only two other sophomores in the class, neither of whom I had ever talked to. The rest was a random toss-up for freshmen, juniors, and mostly seniors. I opted to sit in the back corner and ended up next to a row of loud seniors. That first class was mostly free time, so I spent the better half of it on my phone, occasionally eavesdropping on the seniors beside me, but mostly just texting my friends about how terrible it was going.
This same pattern continued for the first half of the semester. Up until the end of the first quarter, we hadn’t actually coded anything. I walked out every day hating it. Then, we finally opened up our java textbook and started to learn the basics. That’s when everything clicked. The first program we wrote was simple; convert Celsius and Fahrenheit temperatures. It may sound dumb, especially to anyone with coding experience, but seeing my program work that day lit up something inside my brain. It was my spark. That rest of the quarter, although I loathed having no friends and way too much free time in that class, I couldn't wait to see what we would learn next.
I tried to wonder why I loved coding so much. Was it the problem-solving aspect? Was it just working with computers? Then, it clicked; I loved working behind the scenes of everything. Being able to understand the inner workings of the computer lit up my brain and searching through and debugging code soon became a hobby. I started to learn python in my free time and teach computer science classes to kids every weekend. Never did I expect moving a chair in stage crew would lead me to what I wanted to do for the rest of my life, but yet it had. Just like moving that chair my freshman year of the stage crew, computer science introduced me to a new backstage where I could understand everything going on and solve all the problems. Just like that, broken props turned into undefined variables, and ripped costumes turned into unclosed brackets. And my chair from my freshmen year stage crew turned into a computer.