Kevin Gleason ’12 worries he may actually have to move to California. “I know it’s going to happen. Every single tech job is in Silicon Valley,” he says.

 

Gleason is a Midwest/East Coast kind of guy himself. But he’s also a techie eyeing his future. The Boston College junior is web manager for The Torch, B.C.’s Catholic newspaper. The paper’s editor-in-chief, Gleason’s Gilmour classmate Natalie Yuhas ’12 brought him on board there last year.

 

Gleason was just three weeks into his first coding class when he joined The Torch. For the next month, he spent every spare second teaching himself web coding. He acquired enough skills to build an online search mechanism for The Torch. Now readers can punch in a term and the system searches the archives for related articles.

 

Gleason took AP sciences at Gilmour and entered B.C. a pre-med major. But one crack at building gadgets in computer science class and he was hooked. “It was the coolest thing I had ever done,” Gleason says.

 

When the class ended his sophomore year, Gleason switched his major to computer science. In learning about more complicated matters now, such as statistics and data management, he’s beginning to think about programming differently. “It’s no longer about simply making an application functional,” he says. “It’s about making it fast and efficient. That’s difficult.”

 

Gleason last summer completed an internship in Chicago at global technology consulting company Saggezza, and it motivated him to delve deeper into his craft.

 

As for moving to Silicon Valley, “every experience is a positive one if you let it be,” Gleason says. “I’m sure I would learn an incredible amount there and eventually grow to love California, no matter how much it pains me to say that.”

 

Beating U.S. in basketball my senior year in the new gym.

Doc Goel, AP biology. She was without a doubt one of the greatest teachers I’ve had. Her class was the hardest I ever worked and the most I ever learned.

 

Always say “hi” in the elevator. It may be the only chance you get to meet someone and start a friendship.

 

I know how to work a Diablo, a Chinese yo-yo.

 

Develop an application that makes enough money to buy a burger for everyone working on it.