NAF Alumnus Daniel Ansher on the Idea of “Why?”

“I graduated from Thomas S. Wootton High School in 2013 located in Montgomery County, Maryland. During my time at Wootton, I participated in the NAF Academy of Information Technology (AOIT). An AOIT teacher gave an introduction lecture about the technology track during a history class before entering high school. The notion of why society was increasingly becoming attached to our computers and smartphones intrigued me, and as a result I decided to give the program a try.

Ms. Bethany Petr was the AOIT teacher who gave me that initial introduction lecture in 2012. I was always impressed with her ability to keep students engaged. To me, she was not just teaching us about computer science, but she was also teaching us how it could be applied to change the world in all industries. She would often supplement her classes with inspirational videos such as What Most Schools Don’t Teach and craft coding projects that were relevant and fun for our age group.

During my senior year, I worked with a small local business called Mosaic Data Services, Inc. At the time, they sold WordPress themes through their company and I was tasked with designing and implementing a new theme that they would offer for purchase. All of the skills I learned through NAF’s AOIT were put to the test as I actually applied the computing concepts I learned from class and transferred them to the workplace.

Aside from the technical challenges, the high school internship introduced me to project management concepts I wouldn’t have learned in the classroom such as what feature prioritization meant and how deadlines can vary a great deal. Most importantly, I learned how to evaluate a project’s return on investment by ensuring that I was not wasting time with work that would be discarded over time.

At the end of my NAF experience, I received an email from Ms. Petr advertising a summer program at Google called the Computer Science Summer Institute (CSSI). It was a 3-week program aimed at inspiring diverse students to pursue a computer science education by designing and building an application alongside full-time engineers in the field. Soon after I received that email, I spent all my spring break working hard to create a unique and creative application, illustrating key computer science concepts I had already been exposed through the academy. Following high school graduation, I was gratefully accepted and participated in CSSI at Google’s Cambridge office.

Little did I know, the resources and network I had built during that summer would enable me to fast track acceptance into a 3-month engineering internship at Google the following summer. Hungry for more tech experience and curious about retail disruption via the e-commerce space, I later interned at Amazon in Seattle, Washington which ultimately lead me to accept my current position with Amazon in Los Angeles, California. During that time, I attended Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta and graduated in 2017.

In my current job, I serve as a software engineer to design, build, and scale Amazon’s internal products for Prime Video. Working alongside key global stakeholders ranging from product managers to catalog specialists, our team uses machine learning techniques to automatically detect and correct defects in millions of TV shows, movies, and channels in order to improve content quality worldwide.

My NAF academy provided me with a solid, concrete understanding of foundational computing concepts that were crucial to receiving a competitive head start when compared with my peers. I like to compare my NAF experience with learning how to read and write. The NAF curriculum helped me learn my career-skills ABCs. I couldn’t form complex sentences just yet, but by the end of the program, I was able to construct rather complex words and form ideas on my own.

What I found most valuable at NAF’s AOIT was the fact that networking and soft skills building were deeply integrated into parts of the curriculum. We were always working on group projects with our fellow AOIT classmates, mimicking an applicable real-world setting. Some of the graduates that I participated with are still close friends today and referred me to various companies when I was job hunting years after the academy ended. The coding aspect of the job is just half of the work – the other is working with and understanding people who have vastly different perspectives than you.

An important concept I learned in an AOIT basic programming class was the idea of “why”. The motivation behind the reason we wrote our code a certain way, whether that be prioritization of system design or algorithmic efficiency. Similarly, I’ve always asked myself, “Why Computer Science?”

In high school, you’re often stuck with making choices based on societal pressure, dealing with friends and family telling you what they think will make you the most successful, especially when external factors like money are involved. The real value in your work comes only from you, and once you discover what makes you happy and hungry for more, you will succeed without expectation. What do you enjoy doing? What are you excited about? What ideas keep you up at night?

To current NAF students: As you look to obtain insight on understanding your drives and passions, I urge you to ask your “why” and challenge yourself with new and interesting experiences. You never know what you might find.

If it weren’t for NAF’s AOIT, I would have never read Ms. Petr’s email. I would have never discovered CSSI. I would have never built the skills to intern at the places I did so quickly. And I most definitely would not be sitting here writing this. “