My First Day at Upperline
This is a story made to introduce prospective participants at Upperline programs (hopefully, you!) to how awesome your experience can be. For my first article, I thought my own introduction to Upperline would be a good way to do it.
The context of my first experience with Upperline was the Institute for Entrepreneurship program, run by Prep for Prep and Google. Prep for Prep is an organization that teaches fifth and sixth graders at public schools in New York and New Jersey how to be leaders and gives them the opportunity to attend prestigious independent schools. I, uh, suppose you know what Google does.
The Institute for Entrepreneurship program (IFE) was a five-week ordeal, in which the ninth- and tenth-grade participants were split into two groups, the “business side” and the “tech side”. The business side would be taught the details on how to launch and run a business and would create a viable business idea and pitch by the end of the summer. The tech side would be taught the details on how to make website and web apps. At the end of the summer, one person from each side form a pair, which would create an app or website that would showcase the business and pitch to Google employees and executives. The competition at the end would narrow the crowd down until one pair is chosen as the winner, and the three finalist pairs are given money and sweet, sweet Google merch.
For the tech folks, the first four weeks are essentially a four-week course by Upperline, in which the teachers, Jeff Astor and Ben Siegel, taught us how to go from knowing very little about programming to being able to build a working Node.js web app that uses Firebase. We barreled through the basics of most concepts of Javascript in a few days, and learned to use CSS frameworks like MaterializeCSS, APIs, and DOM manipulation, and much more. One time, Jeff brought in a box of donuts and the class went through making a little “donut line” app where people could get in line, get a donut and leave, cut the line, etc., using the Javascript array methods push(), pop(), shift(), and unshift(). However, in past-me’s shoes, today is just the first day of the program.
The day is July 10, 2017, and I walk into the NYU Silver Center, wearing a dress shirt and pants, because we were told to look businesslike to be able to code. When I got up to my floor, after fumbling with ID to give to security guards in the lobby, I sit a large classroom with row of seats, occasionally filled by participants I don’t know. The clock strikes nine and the big bosses of the program are at the front of the room: the director of IFE, the mentor of the business side, and the two men I would come to regard as relatable royalty, Jeff Astor and Ben Siegel.
After a brief icebreaker, in which we are told to go around, collect information about the other participants and write it on an index card, while also wrangling with a slice of pizza, we were thrown into a situation where we had to give presentations on famous entrepreneurs of our choice. My group finished our presentation on Jack Dorsey and the whole group had a discussion on why we were told to do what we did. I understood deep in my heart that this was meant to give us context on entrepreneurship and how learning about past successes were helpful, but I couldn’t help but feel bored and disgruntled. When the hell do we get to start coding?
When We Get to Start Coding
Finally, we are split up into the two groups, and the tech group is whisked away to a separate room. Mistakes were made for which room we were meant to go in, and when we entered one room and were told to exit, we heard Jeff say, “Well, jk lol, it’s this room.” I thought, Hey, he is not some old straight-laced teacher that tells students to get off his lawn because they were stepping on his punch-cards. Indeed, for the rest of the first day, Jeff further proved me correct.
Jeff paced at the front of the room, cracking jokes that a millennial would and making us all laugh, but also set the tone for the class. He explained to us the growing importance of coding proficiency in all of the industries of today and tomorrow, and not just for the technology sector. He showed us all of the professions that grew and shrank over the years, and how since about the turn of the millennium, the frequency of being a computer analyst shot up, becoming one of the most common jobs in the country. He set expectations for the course, explaining to us three levels of comfort a student could be in during a class: comfortable, learning, and panicking. According to him, the best position was the border between learning and panicking, and that it was his goal to keep us there in his classes as long as he could. (He delivered on the promise in the coming days.)
The first day was just setting up, but it was still made fun. We set up Slack accounts (the most important feature of which, we were told, is to insert gif’s using the /giphy command), Cloud9 workspaces, and learned to navigate using the command line. We were given homework and labs to use what we learned, and Ben wrote an elaborate process of sending our homework to Jeff’s GitHub account on the chalkboard. Jeff kept up the act for a few minutes before telling us it was a joke, we didn’t have to submit our homework, and to “Live your life.” This phrase quickly came to be a motif (read: meme) in our class. And with that final joke, we were sent home.
I was eager to go back the next day, because I knew that the teachers deeply cared about teaching us to code and wanted us to gain experience as quickly as we could. Their teaching style was an amazing mix of unrelenting intensity and casual banter, and we learned so much in the first day that I was excited to see what we could do by the end of the four weeks.
I would like to tell the story of how amazingly the other four weeks of the program went for the tech side, but in the paraphrased words of Pierre de Fermat, this blog post is too small to contain it.
