: When you graduated from Dublin High School you attended a prep school instead of college, what drove that decision?Īlong the way Robert also spent a year at Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, New Hampshire as he pursued a passion for hockey and an interest in computer science. First and foremost like many kids who play hockey here, it isn’t very direct to get from high school or club hockey to college hockey. The extra year made sense for me because I wasn’t sure which path I wanted to follow.” There are many routes people take to pursue hockey: ‘juniors’ is playing hockey full-time and there are multiple levels prep school, which I hadn’t heard of until a coach reached out to me, is essentially another year of high school combining school and hockey. : Did the prep school option also make you more visible to coaches?ĭurst: “I did well at Dublin High School so I was already looking to move out of California and attend an East Coast college. I was also good at hockey but there weren’t Division 1 coaches knocking on my door. In the Northeast there’s NESCAC (the New England Small College Athletic Conference) which includes good schools that play Division 3 hockey.” : Hockey was an important part of your high school experience, and you played for the San Jose Junior Sharks. How did you end up shifting your focus from hockey to computer science?ĭurst: “I had my first exposure to computer science while at Dublin High School. One summer I decided to write an iOS app so I downloaded Xcode which is Apple’s developer environment. I had an app idea, started working and realized I had no idea how to code! During my senior year at Dublin High School I took an introductory computer science class which introduced me to a Cyber Technology Academy at Sandia National Laboratory. The Sandia program included a 10-week Python class which really got me going. “I ended up choosing Phillips Exeter Academy because I could combine hockey with more computer science classes, and discovered that I not only loved coding but was pretty good at it. From Exeter I went to Colby College, and continued coding on my own time, and joined the computer science club.
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