Last week I learned of the death of one of the grownups from my childhood church, George Shores. Mr. Shores was my assigned mentor for an academic competition. Winning it may well have been the first event in a virtuous cycle¹, setting me up for a tremendous amount of opportunity. Learning of his death made me reflect on the ways in which relatively small acts of altruism can make a huge impact.

The competition is called ACT-SO. It is organized by the NAACP, and it has a number of academic and cultural categories for high schoolers to compete in. My mom helped lead the program for our county, and tried to get me to participate. As an anxious kid, intimidated by large projects, competitions, and attention, I avoided ACT-SO until my senior year. However, that year, I had a hobby project I had already been working on that I thought might work as an entry. It was a simple encryption utility. It took in text and a password, spitting out encrypted text. It also worked backwards to decrypt an encrypted file.

When I joined the competition, Mr. Shores was assigned as my mentor. Because the core project was mostly done, he helped me out on the presentation. This wasn’t my strong suit, so I’m sure having the input of an engineer was really helpful in getting my presentation polished.

I wish I could say that I remembered a great deal about working with Mr. Shores, but it was more than 20 years ago and during an intense time in my life when I was dealing with the tragic death of my cousin. But I do remember Mr. Shores being very encouraging and validating. There’s really no one else I knew locally who had the background to understand what I made, so that may have made all the difference to being able to put together a winning package.

The competitions

I was probably the only entry in the local county competition, so winning gold was a matter of meeting the minimum standard for the presentation. I got to go on to the national competition, which took place in the summer between my high school graduation and first semester of college. There, I set up my project poster, presented to the judges, and answered their questions. And then my role was done. I attended categories of the competition,

The awards ceremony worked kind of like the Oscars. All of the hundreds of participants were brought together in one giant auditorium. You didn’t know who won each category until they announced. When they called my name for the gold medal for computer science, my county delegation went wild. It’s one of the first times in my life I remember really feeling like a winner, and certainly the most significant to date. More than that, I felt seen for an idea that I came up with and realized.

A 180 degree turn

I look back on this as a turning point in my life, and it happened at a critical time. High school was a bad experience for me. I had a hard time adjusting and I felt like I basically wasted my 4 years, without anything remarkable to show for it, or even many of the stereotypical high school experiences.

College, by contrast, was an incredible time for me. I got involved in everything. Looking back, I think the self-confidence that ACT-SO gold medal inspired in me drove me to challenge myself.

Combined with my National Merit Finalist award, the medal was the first real credential to go on my resume. This helped me get my first internship, the summer after my freshman year, when many people can’t get a job. That internship helped me get the GEM Fellowship. The Fellowship was probably the main thing that got me into Princeton for my master’s degree. All of these experiences got me accepted to Teach For America. I went on to return to grad school to study Music Technology, won Best Grad Student project at the departmental showcase in 2011 and 2013 and won Outstanding Student in 2012. While there, I co-founded a startup, which made the finals of the NYU Stern Entrepreneur’s Challenge. All of these experiences set me up for my career in tech.

The lesson I’ll take with me

I realized pretty quickly in this journey how much a little validation matters in getting access to more opportunities, which generate more validation. But it all started with validation from Mr. Shores of a 17-year-old kid’s idea. Maybe I would have won anyway, but maybe I wouldn’t have. And if I hadn’t, who knows how many other dominoes might not have fallen.

It’s something I hope to keep in mind. Helping out doesn’t always have to be a huge commitment to matter a lot in someone’s journey. Hopefully this will continually inspire me to make the extra effort.

RIP Mr. Shores, and thank you for helping put me on a better path.

1. virtuous cycle: a chain of events in which one desirable occurrence leads to another which further promotes the first occurrence and so on resulting in a continuous process of improvement (Merriam-Webster) ↩︎