Cooperation Overcomes Competition by Marco

Cooperation Overcomes Competition by Marco - June 2019 Scholarship Essay

During my Junior year, I enrolled in AP Computer Science, and I entered with the naive mindset to prove that I was the greatest. I was always raised with the mentality to strive to be the best at everything you do, and I especially wanted to strive in my academic interests. However, on the first day, my teacher insistently spoke to the class about how we are all in this together, and that we succeed as a class, not as an individual.

For the first marking period, we took all of our exams with a partner. At first, I was unfavorable to the idea because I did not want to give away free answers, but I soon found out that helping other students understand programming was beneficial to our entire class system. As more of my peers understood concepts, the entire room was able to collaborate on problems and projects. Widespread collaboration allowed for different and beneficial perspectives that I may have never experienced so I was able to learn a lot from my peers. I never found myself in my own seat during class, as I would venture around the room working with different students. Having this environment made programming alone seem significantly less productive and engaging, and many students would find themselves waiting all day to team up in class.

To solve this problem, a few of us created a formal proposal to the school to start a computer science club, and it was met with enthusiastic approval. Our club provides additional after-school hours for students to have time to collaborate with each other on projects. Also, we strongly encourage students with no programming experience to join, and I have had the pleasure of introducing computer science to many new students, which has continued expanding this collaborative environment.