This is one story I’ve never told before. Not to anyone. I was on my way to my first true college experience. As my dad drove up, I was thinking about how my life would completely change in the next week. Last summer, I was heading to Madison, Wisconsin for a computer summer camp and for the first time in my life I’d be completely independent and away from my family for a week. Not only was I planning to learn a lot in the class, but I also was looking forward to seeing the person I will become on my own. I had learned the city map and read everything I could about the camp, so I knew exactly what to expect.

When I signed in, I received my room key and headed to my dorm room. As I unlocked my dorm door, I placed my luggage on my bed and looked over to see who had moved in before me. From the Winnie the Pooh pillow case, I got my first indicator of what kind of week it would be. I left the room and walked to the recreation room at the end of the hall. There were six people in the room. Three of them were counselors who looked to be college aged and three of them were other boys who I guessed to be about ten years old. I was the last to arrive and they had settled around a card table eating pizza. No one introduced themselves, so I turned to my parents and said goodbye. I shot them the “Get me the heck out of here” glare, but as always, my parents were completely oblivious. They gave me a hug and left promptly. Finally I was offered to join them by a camp counselor that wore a fedora and dressed like the teen actors from the 90’s driver education video. She had the name Mothership Q; the reference I now know is for a character in Rock Band.

I was closer to the ages of the leaders than the other campers. There were only four overnight campers. After they finished eating, they wanted to start a game. I had a long trip up and didn’t really want to sit around and play a card game, but I stayed. They insisted that I could learn the basics of the game, Munchkin, just by joining in. With cards like “Duck of Doom” and “Bad Ass China Dragon Steed,” and fourteen different levels, I was never going to understand how to play this wizard game. Somehow it made plenty sense to the other three campers who ranged from seven to twelve. It was a lost cause, so I went over to the couches and started watching Storage Wars with the head camp leader who was fittingly named ‘Big Papa’ and the male nurse who Big Papa called ‘Gaylord.’ I was the only one old enough there to understand that joke. Time awkwardly went by to ten, where we returned to our rooms. I finally found out which of the kids was my roommate. I can’t remember his name because he never talked more than to ask me to unlock the door when he locked his keys in. The only thing I remember is that he looked like a mix between Rowan Atkinson and Spock.

I woke up early and showered way before everyone else. The others eventually woke up to the thundering banging of Big Papa on their doors. It was camp tradition to watch Dog the Bounty Hunter before breakfast. This camp wasn’t awful, it was just the opposite of what I expected. After breakfast we caught the city bus and headed to the computer sciences building. Fortunately, the four overnight campers including myself were not the only students. The Java class I was in had nine kids, who were closer to my age, but none closer than a couple years. Although the group was very small and young, we covered more about programming during that week than the AP Computer Science class at my high school teaches in the first month. By lunchtime of the first day, I had already developed a terminal version of a helicopter game where the object is to avoid hitting the floor and ceiling of randomly changing cave walls.

Throughout the week we had late night gaming nights where we played multiplayer games like TRON. Among the games that the others were playing was Minecraft, the most pointless game ever created. I couldn’t comprehend how people could waste their entire day at camp putting virtual blocks together. While others exhausted their time with aimless games, I developed a Tic-tac-toe game that was a challenge to beat. By the end of the week, I got a sense of growth and maturity. Also I found that everyone there wasn’t afraid to express their inner geek and it seemed that everyone shared similar interests. Hanging around immature kids for a week showed me what not to be and made me feel that I was far from an awkward computer kid. The feeling of accomplishment was worth being an outsider for a week. What I learned that week I would have never learned anywhere else.