Richard Mondello

I’ve been writing a résumé of my high school accomplishments, but have been hung up on one major issue in particular. I once started a massive technological project that was promising and successful, until it was eventually undermined by forces out of my control. I wondered if I should mention my participation in the project. Normally, it would be an exemplary story of initiative and skill development; however, it ended in failure. Here we go:

When I was a mere freshman, I was approached by a technical worker whom I was friends with at my high school, and was asked if I had any ideas to get some sort of television-driven announcement distribution system established throughout the school. I had plenty of free time back then, and by the next day I had a decent prototype created. Technically, it was unimpressive - a web page with three frames. The top frame had a clock that updated itself and slowly moved left and right. The middle frame’s loaded a .txt file and scrolled messages up the screen. The bottom frame was a CNN-esque ticker, which also loaded from a .txt file. My idea was that one could remotely access a computer attached to the video feed and launch the web page full screen. Then, he or she would update the .txt files to update the announcements. The master web page would force-refresh itself every 10 minutes to display updates. The system was simple, but elegant. It got the job done, and cost taxpayers nothing.

For a long time, that’s what we used. ‘We’ reefers to the committee set up, consisting of me, a member of administration, the technology department, and a few other teachers. I was the sole student. That didn’t stop me from taking charge, though. I called the shots and named the project “DNN: The Dover News Network”. I photoshopped a logo together, and was excited to keep coding new features into the project. Excuse the shoddy photoshop work and the tribute to CNN. It’s ironic that I now detest CNN and the other American news networks.

In the project, I had my first experience with working in committee with someone intolerable. This person was a teacher who I never had, who was responsible for the cable system. He wanted video, rather than simply text and images. With my implementation in HTML, CSS, and Javascript, that was impossible. I thought, and still think, that the addition of video was an awful idea.

I had a different take. The direction the project was going required the purchasing of dozens of televisions for the school classrooms. Meanwhile, the project was essentially a web page that could be loaded on any computer. At that time in Dover High School, there was at least one computer in almost every classroom, but far fewer televisions. Additionally, a computer screen has higher resolution and quality than a television, and users would have far more control of DNN via a web browser than via immutable television screen. Purchasing backward technology was an unwise investment, and adding video to the mix made no sense. There was no content to be served. The school didn’t own a single video camera, nor a computer capable of editing video. Finally, who would edit the video?

Eventually, my worst nightmare occurred: I lost control of the project. The other members of the committee, ‘adults’, decided that an expensive proprietary software package was necessary to save the day. They were overhauling my system without considering my concerns. I was told that putting a link to the web page that ran the full-screen system on the computer desktops was “impossible” and a “security hazard”.

They had taken my baby from me. I had spent clearly over 100 hours of my time creating, maintaining, and adding features to DNN, for no compensation whatsoever. Meetings happened more infrequently, and eventually no one updated the system with its new software. Ironically, the expensive software did a horrible job at handling the simple tasks my web page did for months. It would lag, crash, or freeze daily.

Frustrated, I sent out a memo calling for a meeting with the others involved in the project. We sat down, and they again began talking about lofty goals they did not understand how to implement. I interrupted them, and laid an ultimatum. I reminded them that I’d spent an excess of one hundred hours of my time on a project that was replaced with the blink of an eye, and asked if I could be given community service hours in exchange for my work, retroactively. In Dover, all students are required to acquire ninety hours of community service before graduating. I had actually already gotten mine through fulfilling volunteer work at an elementary school, but wanted to be compensated somehow.

I was the driving force, but was in the back seat. One can’t put hours of valuable time into something he or she doesn’t believe in. I knew that after leaving that meeting that I would never work on the project again, and it would never move forward.

I was absolutely correct. As of this year, the system is inactive.

Today, two years later, I’m not bitter. I was at the time, but have since moved on to bigger and better things in my high school career. On top of that, I learned plenty from the experience. The technical knowledge is absolute rubbish today, but I experienced the shortcomings of bureaucracy, and encountered what happens when ignorance and personal agendas are allowed to govern committee. I was guilty of the latter portion, but most certainly not the former.

I’ve decided to make the experience a mere bullet point on my résumé of my high school accomplishments. My rationale is that harping on that experience in an essay would be an essay of half-truths - out of the question. Alas, I can’t bring myself to remove it from my résumé completely; I was proud of it. It was mine.

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