Calculators, Magicians, and Diamonds
My eighth grade math teacher was a stale, unpleasant, rather portly old man who obviously hated teaching. He had the notion that the best way for his students to learn was to assign us scores of repetitious problems in the form of “find x” without explaining to us what we were actually doing. One night as I drearily plugged quadratic formula after quadratic formula into my graphing calculator it dawned on me that there had to be some shortcut for the work. I looked up “how to program a calculator” on Google and that evening I completely fell in love with programming. It wasn’t before long that I’d put my old TI-83 calculator behind me and was spending most of my free time building web pages and exploring the magical worlds of Java, C++, and Python.
I arrived at Stanford having every intention of majoring in computer science and eventually joining Google or a startup or fulfilling some other Silicon Valley cliche.
My freshman year I met Kyle, a professional teenage magician obsessed with development economics who is the single most extreme utilitarian I’ve ever met. He opened my eyes to the importance of humanitarianism, and convinced me to join Amnesty International and an anti-genocide group at school. However, I soon got bored of the letter campaigns and the documentary showings and realized there had to be a more effective way to help people around the world.
As this was going on, the media was awash with stories of WikiLeaks, Anonymous, Occupy, Stuxnet, the Arab Spring, and Kony 2012. One evening, a man I’d never heard of named Larry Diamond came to give an informal dinner talk at my dorm about the state of democracy in the world and his concept of “Liberation Technology”. After hearing this talk, I realized that I’d found the perfect way to use my skill at programming to do something meaningful for the world.
My name is Zak, I’m 20, and I’m a visiting summer fellow on the ICT team at NDI.
I’ve only been here a week and I love the place. At Stanford I was used to being surrounded by programmers who dreamt of creating the next “Angry Birds” app or some other profitable trifle for bored and lazy Americans. It’s refreshing to instead be around programmers who are working to realize a vision of the world where citizens are free of political repression, violence, and poverty.
I’m really looking forward to working with the team this summer and getting to see how ICT4D is actually developed and implemented. I hope to go back to Stanford this fall more clear about my academic purpose and better able to inspire other computer science students to code for a cause.
In a weird way I feel I must thank my awful eighth grade math teacher for nudging me down the road that has brought me here.