End of Senior Year

This post will detail events happening in June, mostly.

5 May: Yay, birthday! Hannah gave me a plateful of brownies, which I distributed to my colleagues and Dr. Nevard during internship. By this time, Mr. Vidal was banned from entering BCA (long story; I'll probably cover this later in much more detail), so we decided to go to a nearby restaurant to have lunch. Because we were all tired of Boston Market and did not want to go to the Coach House diner, we decided to meet at Brooklyn Pizza. Little did we know that we were not allowed to cross the street, despite being at internship (I'm pretty sure that everyone who works off campus is allowed to do so). We found out, while walking to the restaurant, when we encountered a teacher, who lectured us on campus policies and subsequently reported us to the vice principal. Thankfully, none of us received detention; he just lectured me when he saw me in the hall.

2 Jun: Senior experience presentations. Unfortunately, I had the privilege of presenting to Ms. Anderson, one of BCA's incompetent and arrogant technology teachers (I say technology because it's really that; she thinks that she's teaching computer science). I was also quite surprised that we had a full house, considering that the internship wouldn't exist next year. To finish this with a blast, I decided to troll the slideshow (including trollface and playing Always on the last slide). On one of my slides where I had to describe Monte Carlo integrations, I was able to refer to the Riemann-Zeta function (it was so relevant and fitting!) while explaining the canonical pi calculation example. The handouts, in particular, were awesome: we made two versions, one with a legitimate overview of the internship for the teachers, and one with a hilarious description filled with puns and memes for the students. At the end, several students commended us on our successful troll attempt. Regardless of our mischief, I received an A for the trimester and the year. Win!

3 Jun: CompSci Day. This was actually another of Mr. Vidal's brilliant ideas, but was run by some CompSci Families parents instead (for obvious reasons). It was a luncheon for all students interested in computer science and featured some students who wanted to present their projects. Of course, I took the opportunity to present Battleship visualizer, the [formerly] ongoing Computer Team activity. As the first one to go, I presented for ten minutes on the various aspects of the Visualizer, such as Java being annoying, running external processes, how game designing is not trivial (contrary to another student's assertion that Java makes game development easy), and how two [skilled] programmers were able to put together a ~1000 line program in two weeks, with about an hour's worth of work each day. Everyone seemed thoroughly impressed (and amused -- the most important part!) by the presentation, especially the demos. :)

4-5 Jun: ARML. This was covered in a previous post. To recap, AAST Mu A finished 9th, the best in the recent four years.

9 Jun: Senior Luncheon. The class parents and teachers took us to a fancy restaurant, where we had lunch, took pictures, and signed yearbooks. The lunch was so fancy that everyone had four forks and two knives.

10 Jun: Prom. Again, this has been detailed in a previous post. This was the first of three events in which Troll, inc. (Patrick, Julia, me, and perhaps Sam, though he's always too shy to make a public move) tried to get the DJ to play Troll Music®.

11 Jun: Our hypothetical afterprom dissolved in thin air, so I stayed home for the day. Later that night I went with Dan and Sam to the mall for the night. We got dinner (teryaki for Dan, hamburger for Sam, and sushi for me), played around in the Apple store for an hour (yay Python and iOS games!), and then watched the Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. Sam didn't mind seeing the movie twice in two weeks.

13 Jun: Joe Holbrook Memorial. It has already been almost five months since the old geezer passed away. The ceremony began at 4:30 when close friends of his and two BCA alums gave speeches, followed by dinner. At 6:30, Mark and I interviewed two candidates for the five Math Team Captain positions. They lasted until 8:00. Finally I went home.

16 Jun: Six Flags! This was my first time going to a theme park in two years. I was so excited to go on Superman, the only large roller coaster that I could withstand, but it was closed. Julia and I went on Rolling Thunder three times and screamed `CARD GAMES ON ROLLER COASTERS' pretty much on every decently-sized drop. Here is her post about it.

17 Jun: Our first graduation rehearsal. We get our caps, gowns, tickets, and picture taken. Luckily, we had no classes, but we just spent the entire day sitting in the gymnasium waiting to rehearse (we did it by academies). I spent a good amount of time watching some AEDT guys play Half Life (or whatever FPS it was) on Xbox 360.

18 Jun: Field day. Mark, Pavel, and I did final Math Team interviews and made our decision soon after. For the rest of the day we camped out in a classroom and played on our laptops. Somewhere right after lunch we played a bridge hand with Dr. Abramson.

19 Jun: Math Team Party. Mark and I passed down math team leadership to the five chosen candidates. We ate pizza.

20 Jun: Mr. Vidal's family and my family went to a local Thai restaurant to have lunch for Father's day. We talked mainly about the slew of unfortunate events that has happened at the school and I finally returned his GPU Gems book. Also Thai food is good when not very spicy.

21 Jun: Second of three graduation rehearsals. We ended up finishing approximately three hours before schedule, so we were dismissed at 11:00! Sam graciously drove me home and we played bridge.

22 Jun: Last day of school! The entire day was devoted to graduation rehearsal, but we managed to finish two hours earlier, so Sam and I hung out in Dr. Nevard's room. Unfortunately, not many people showed up to Computer Team. Oh well. At the end of the half day, I took home the ACSL prize printer that the ACSLers graciously gave to me for being their coach. I must have looked pretty weird carrying a printer out of the school XD

23 Jun: Graduation! It was a pretty basic graduation: walk on stage, listen to speeches while trying not to fiddle with hair or scratch face, get diploma, and walk (and jump) off stage, all while being filmed by over 9000 cameras. Because BCA teachers are cool, the director asked us to submit music suggestions for the song played at the end of graduation. Of course, I emailed her:

Here are some songs I would like:

1. Rick Astley - Never Gonna Give You Up
2. Erasure - Always

Thanks!

Sherry Wu

To which she replied:

Great songs. Thanks!

What a great response XD Unfortunately, none of the songs were played. Oh well, I tried.

However, our trolling efforts were finally fruitful during Project Graduation. We were fortunate that Patrick's mom was the co-director of the event, so Patrick was able to insert the Rickroll and Always in the mix CD. To our amusement, the Rickroll did play! Pretty much everyone groaned except for the nerds, who laughed. Julia, Patrick, and I bursted in excitement that our efforts finally paid off. What a great ending to four years at BCA.