Montgomery Blair High School Magnet Program

Today, I blog about a more personal topic. I was privileged to go to the Math, Science, and Computer Science Magnet Program at Montgomery Blair High School. It is a public school program for the top 100 mathematically enabled students in the county. The students are chosen through essays, teacher recommendations, and test scores, much like the college process. The program allows these students to take a highly accelerated curriculum in mathematics, science, engineering, and computer science. It is held in a public school, and the students still take their English, social studies, gym, arts, etc. classes with other public school students that are not part of the program. Freshmen and sophomore years, the curriculum is pretty rigid and require all the students to rotate through physics, chemistry, earth sciences, and biology during the four semesters. Paired with each of these sciences are a computer science course and an engineering course. The coursework is done in an interdisciplinary way such that projects are created with all three subjects in mind. For example, when I was in the magnet, in the very first month of being a high-school magnet student, students are required to engineer and build a device to transport a 1" ball bearing through a 3" diameter hole in a vertical wall 10/10 times. The closest point of the device must be at least 1 yard away from the wall at all times, and the hole is 10" from the ground. Students must create a computer simulation using physics equations to show the device's trajectory and how it is affected by things such as the coefficient of air friction.

Junior and senior years, students are given a lot of flexibility. They can choose from elective courses like Optics, Artificial Intelligence with LISP, Robotics, Complex Analysis (Multi-variate Calculus), Materials Engineering, and Discrete Mathematics. The magnet is also very generous about allowing other students in the school not part of the magnet program take advantage of these great courses and the resources of the magnet program. In my own experience, I had several non-magnet classmates in my Marine Biology, Quantum Physics, and Thermodynamics courses. Magnet teachers are also generous in their time by sponsoring various after-school activities and sports for the whole school. It is not uncommon for just one magnet teacher to sponsor 4 to 7 after-school clubs.

If it was not for the magnet, I would not have found out about my aptitude for computer science. I was given the chance to have hands on experience on being a Systems Administrator when I was fifteen years old. I got to play with chemicals in a Fourier-transform microwave spectrometer at the National Institute of Technology for a whole summer and learned to write a research paper on it good enough for me to become semi-finalist in the Intel Science Talent Search (formerly Westinghouse), which the Blair Magnet Program holds the highest number of semifinalists from one school nearly every year. My fellow classmates have gone to top schools across the nation and followed there dreams wherever they led them. Some became lawyers, doctors, engineers or businessmen. But there are also the ones who took their geekdom to TV, author a webcomic or a video game journalist, win puzzle solving world champions, became an entrepreneur with a Dessert Truck in the middle of NYC, hold a seat as Maryland House of Delegate representative, traveled to a foreign country to teach English, and really do whatever we wanted with our lives. I wouldn't be surprised if everyone one of those people would say that going to Blair affected their lives and their careers in at least some way or another. Whether it was the connections we gained, the encouragement and stimulation our minds received, and the opportunities we had to do things that other schools did not offer, it changed our lives in a highly positive way.

The reason I decided to write so loquaciously about this topic is because the Montgomery County Board of Education has decided to severely cut funding for this program. Though it's a small program, there are many of us who have been influenced by the program and we are not happy by the county's budget proposals. Being that it is a small program however, the cuts they are making are small compared to the overall budget, but cause a huge impact on the program.

I am nowhere near the point in my life to seriously plan this right now, but I had always wanted to raise kids in the area I grew up in. I don't think it's very uncommon of a dream though. I am just sad that I will not be able to give them the same opportunities I had, and it is out of my control.