National Security Agency: Personal Statement

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For my senior year of high school, I worked as a work study for the National Security Agency. There were around a hundred work studies, each one assigned to a different branch. I worked in the Technical Directorate as a secretary at first and then a computer aide when they started assigning me to projects. I worked on a total of two projects while I was there, one was with a team I only spoke to at the beginning and the end of the project, the other one was with a close knit group of contractors. Working on each project was quite an experience, although each project was very different from the other.

Why do most jobs want someone skilled in teamwork? What I have learned from my previous high school classes is that working in a group means …show more content…
It was around two months in when I began the first project. The application code had already been written but the GUI was barely there, so I was tasked with making it look more professional. Prior to this job I had only taken one programming course in high school and it was taught so apathetically that it did not help me with my current assignment. It was because of this lack of knowledge I think that I ran into so many problems. For around a week I was stuck on a bug where whenever the user pressed the “Create New Tab” button, a button that was meant to create a new tab for additional inputs, would instead create the correct tab but the user could not interact with the tab at all. I finally solved the issue due to a stroke of good luck, when a coworker, who was much more experienced than I at programming, happened to be talking to my cubicle mate and noticed my problem. After looking at my code for a bit, he noticed the problem was a simple issue of parentheses; obstacles were not even the things slowing me down the most. Most of my time was spent on side projects that would start after I followed a tangent to while looking up solutions for the project. It was because of my general lack of programming knowledge and, my ability to be easily distracted, that the Python GUI project took around four months to complete. After I presented the finished GUI to …show more content…
At first, I worked on the project alone with the other members of the team helping when needed, but around a week into the project, the project manager was able to find the money to keep one of the interns, Emily, who was working on the project before I joined the team. Emily, like me, did not have any substantial programming experience but wanted to learn because she had to take a programming course next semester to graduate. Within a month, we had made more progress on this project than I had in two months on the previous Python project. This productivity was mostly due to both of us keeping the other one on track. It is more difficult to get off track when you're working with someone else because they will usually steer you back on track before long. When I was working on the python script, I spent a day or two looking up random things like pickles, which is when a Python object hierarchy is converted into a byte stream; on the other hand, when I was working on the Java project, if an offshoot idea was proving to be not that fruitful, we would quickly try another approach. A further example of how unproductive we were when we were alone was when both of us went on vacation at different times. We were using SCRUM at the time so when we worked on specific parts of the
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