HSCC Testimonial: Frantzy Jean Philippe (New York)

Many of you have supported our fundraising efforts to support the youth education programs taking place in 50 cities around the country. However, we still need more funding if we are to continue bridge the 'digital divide'. We thought you would appreciate hearing directly from one of the students impacted by your generousity.

Frantzy Jean Philippe was a member of the high school computer competition team trained this year by BDPA New York chapter. Here is what he had to say about the experience.

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"It has been an amazing experience being part of the BDPA HSCC team. When I first started pursuing a spot in being part of the HSCC team, I never realized how much BDPA would have changed my life. I had great experiences from the trip to the Museum of Modern Arts to the 2008 BDPA National Conference held in Atlanta GA. BDPA accomplished its mission in exposing students like me to Information Technology. Through the many trips that we took part in, I have developed a deep interest in Information Technology and have decided to pursue it in college.

Training for the competition has been both hard and fun. At first, it was intense seeing how we were still learning and there was a lot of competitiveness between us. However, as the competition nears, we each realized that we were strong in one major area of programming. We were closer than any other teams. Unlike most of the other teams, we were from the same school. Additionally, our trainer was also our teacher as well as our friend. It is best to train and learn when you know the people whom you train with well. We appreciate our trainer because we would have never come this far if it was not for him. He sacrificed many of his time in order to prepare us for the competition. For example, he sacrificed his birthday just to be with us during our second regional competition in Maryland. The regional competitions had a big influence on our performance in the national competition. It was a great way to get us accustomed to the way of the competition and at the same time, we had a lot of fun.

The conference itself was the best experience that I have ever had in my entire life. I liked the fact that we were able to experience the cultural wonders of Atlanta in many ways. In addition, we not only applied all that we have learned during the year, we learned new things as well. During the first day of the Youth Technology Camp, I learned effective communication, something that will surely help me later on in life. BDPA has exceeded its original mission and made sure that students like me do not just have a good future in information technology, but have good skills in whichever path they follow in life. One of the greatest events that I enjoyed during the conference was the opening ceremony. The keynote speaker, Ephren Taylor, inspired us all. His success story inspired us to pursue whatever we want in life.
From the master of ceremony, Mario Armstrong we learned not to let “dream killers” gets in our way. This became a motif as we learned throughout the entire conference. One of the greatest moments in the opening ceremony came when Mr. Armstrong gave an HSCC student the opportunity to pursue his dream of Game Designing by providing the student with software that were perhaps valued at one thousand dollars. I was amazed to see how great people like him make sure that people like us succeed in accomplishing their dreams.

The High School Computer Competition was one of the best parts of the conference. It was intense and enjoyable at the same time. On the first day of the competition, we were calmer than we were in the regional competitions and we did excellent. This made us even more confident on the second day where the real competition began in building our web application. We responded rather calmly to the long time of seven hours to eight hours that we had to build the application seeing that we were used to programming for this amount of time during our training. We did very well and we finished all of the functionalities given to us. We were very proud of ourselves seeing that we worked as a team to finish the application. We each did our individual jobs perfectly and our application was very strong.

After a hard week, we were all looking forward to going home. However, our flight cancelled due to overwhelming circumstances. We had the chance to stay in Atlanta an extra night. Even though we were all anxious to go home, we were rather calm in handling the situation. We were lucky enough that the BDPA National president, Ms. Denise Holland provided us her presidential suite for us to spend the night in. We took this with great appreciation for Ms. Holland and BDPA for taking good care of its members. We had an amazing night in the presidential suite. The most surprising moment of the entire trip later became one of the greatest moment of the trip."

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Well, BDPAers ... what say u?