I don’t usually do the whole personal blogging thing however Transition Year has been one of the most amazing experiences of my, so far, short life and I think I need to share that.
From what I can tell many parents dread the idea of Transition Year, their kids will be doing “nothing” for a whole year. Of course, you have to put effort in to get something out of Transition Year but if you do what you get out of it its unbelievable.
For those who don’t know, Transition Year is the fourth year in Irish secondary school, where you transition between the Junior Certificate course and the Leaving Certificate course. In this year you do random things as will come to light in the rest of this blog post.
In transition year I have had some of the most amazing experiences which I certainly would not have experienced had I gone straight in to the Leaving Certificate course.
For a start I had my work experience in The Independent, a totally new environment. I didn’t think that I would like working in an office at all, however since I was doing what I love, it was brilliant. Now I knew I could work in an office and not be bored out of my mind.
Then I wrote a programming language. If I had been doing the Leaving Cert course there is no way that I would have been able to do this. Writing an extremely simple programming language, which I never finished, was still probably one of the most difficult things I’ve ever done but the amount I learnt was amazing.
I learnt about data structures such as Binary Search Trees, Linked Lists and Hash Tables. Things I would never have come across till college through my dabbling in web development. I learnt about the underlying structure of compilers and interpreters, all of which made me a fundamentally better programmer.
Furthermore If I hadn’t written this language, I would not have entered the Young Scientist, here I met some of the people who I would now consider some of my best friends.
Up to this point I thought I was having a pretty good year. However it was just about to get better. Next I had my week of work experience in Contrast where I learnt a huge amount about how much work 4 guys can get done by themselves, how less is more and how unbelievably awesome it would be if I could work somewhere like that when I left college.
The week after Contrast, I experienced my first “product launch”. It was nothing big but it got a great response (launching what I had built at Contrast). Followed immediately by attending Future of Web Apps conference in Dublin.
Had I been doing my Leaving Cert I might have still attended FOWA but I certainly wouldn’t have spent a week in Contrast and if I did not spend a week in Contrast, I would not have met Paul Campbell and therefore I wouldn’t have had lunch with Blaine Cook and I would not have shook DHH’s hand (hey it’s a big thing for me!).
However at this point. I thought it was over. The good part of Transition Year was over. It was the day before I went away to France for four weeks to stay in a French boarding school to learn French, I was dreading even the thought of it.
I have never been so wrong in my life. What was to follow was the best four weeks of my life, it was so good I stayed two extra weeks and if I could, I would go back immediately. In France I met just the most amazing people and had the time of my life.
When I came back, to put it lightly, I was a tad depressed. However I came back to some amazing friends who without the Young Scientist 5 months ago, I would never had been friends with.
Then today, today was my last day of “supposed to be in school” Transition Year and I was in Camara developing software to be sent to developing countries in Africa to help easily deploy Moodle, school management software.
So to all those people who skip transition year, to all those people who say it should be abolished or those who just complain about it. It was an unbelievably amazing experience, one which I think everyone should take part in. Just my two cents.
