12 Tiger - Thursday, March 14, 2013
Feature
Feature
Out and About The Hope for Haiti club began selling friendship bracelets today for one to two dollars. The fundraiser will take place at lunch on the Tiger Patio on Thursday for the next two weeks and proceeds will benefit the charity Hands Together. /Rhian Moore
Virtual business preps for Oakland By Jenny Wang Staff Writer
Sophia Arriola
Senior Jackie Huang is one of many SPHS artists and photographers who have had their work spotlighted in the front office. The display board both beautifies the school entrance and allows artists to receive feedback.
Main office display features student artwork
By Kea Hudson Staff Writer Wall decorations are usually not the first thing on a student’s mind when entering the main office, but the observant eye will notice that the South Pasadena High School office is adorned with a display board of student artwork. The board features drawings and photography from
Past Features Shizue Iwayanagi Paul Messana Amber Laird
AP and second-year art students, giving the young artists an opportunity to receive feedback and recognition from the public. In the fall, the display featured work from selected art projects, such as the self-portrait project and the Rhode Island School of Design Bicycle Project. The RISD project challenged students to create a graphite drawing that involved a bicycle. In the self-portrait project, students had the freedom to express their appearance in their preferred medium. The board then converted into a display for senior art shows during the spring semester, spotlighting creations from a different student each week. “The idea was to showcase the talent of individual senior artists, showing the range of their work as it’s developed throughout their high school years,” art
teacher Ms Aimee Hultman said. Hultman selects senior artists for the display based on the quality, quantity, and readiness of their work. This week’s featured artist is senior Jackie Huang, whose selected pieces explore the depths of feminism and her personal conflicts over family struggles and identity. “I try to locate patterns shimmering with the intricacy of lighting, orchestrating the disparate struggle between light and dark,” Huang said. “I mainly get inspiration from movies, which spark my own cognitive activities [and force] me to construct, devise, and process from an idea to the birthing of a creation.” Next week’s board will feature work by senior Flora Leung; a different senior will be featured every week throughout the semester.
After dominating at the Bakersfield competition, the South Pasadena High School Virtual Business teams quickly shifted gears from celebrating victories to preparing for their upcoming competition, the Bay Area Trade Fair, on March 17 and 18. The varsity team is currently working with the feedback it received at Bakersfield to perfect its company. In lieu of the Business Plan competition, which will not be taking place in San Francisco, there will be a competition entitled Venture Capital, in which business teams have two minutes to sell their company to a group of venture capitalists interested in making an investment. Seniors Ashim Shrestha, Pooja Vyas, and Tyler Armstrong were selected by Virtual Business teacher Mrs. Cathy Mason to represent SPHS in Venture Capital. “Oftentimes people will be focused solely on aspects related to their department. However, what will set our team apart is how well we can tie in our company’s philosophy to our competitions,” said junior Michael Ruan, vice president of the Expedition Operations department. “When making a sales pitch to a judge, we’re not just listing benefits; we want them to understand how [Expedition is] leading a revolution in outdoor education.” Due to limited transportation, only a select number of team members from each junior varsity team, Cilk and Óneiro, will compete in San Francisco. Nevertheless, members of both companies are optimistic they will be able to adequately represent their companies. “[We have] been working very hard to put [our] best effort into preparing for these competitions, so I’m confident we’ll all do well. Since a large portion of Cilk isn’t able to go to San Francisco, those of us going will make sure to represent and spread word about our company. Hopefully we’ll be able to place in the competitions we’re participating in, too,” said Megan Srisutham, marketing specialist in Cilk. Following the Bay Area Trade Fair, select seniors from the varsity team will join members of Cilk and Expedition’s business plan teams in April for their final competition of the year, the national Youth Business Summit in New York City.
Personality Profile: Mac Goldwhite By Amber Laird Copy Editor Most high school students have only vague ideas of what their true passions are, but senior Mac Goldwhite has never really cared for the path most high school students take. After a brief but highly technical and jargon-filled explanation of the functions of GLSL, a computer programming language he taught himself, Goldwhite realized that he had lost his audience and decided to amend his answer: “It does pretty things fast.” Goldwhite is an entirely selftaught computer programmer, but he considers himself a primarily artistic person. While this combination may seem unusual, it makes perfect sense to one who sees math, science and art as not separate, but complementary. “Not many artists use math as a medium for art,” Goldwhite said, “but there are lots of possibilities with algorithms that haven’t been explored.”
He has always known the joy of art, making detail-focused pen drawings from a young age. His innate understanding of shape, physics, and mechanics is apparent in his intricate drawings. But Goldwhite now prefers to make art on the computer, where the limitations of hand-drawn art cease to exist. His discovery began in the sixth grade, when he began creating animations on a now-outdated program called Flash MX on the middle school’s computers. From there, Goldwhite discovered ActionScript, with which he created simplistic computer games. One of his earlier creations was a maze with a series of walls that the cursor was not allowed to touch. Goldwhite’s skills have grown significantly since then and the tech enthusiast has taught himself multiple computer programming languages, beginning with C++. Learning one of these languages is a process that takes a month or two of consistent practice. Despite his proficiency, Goldwhite admits that
no one ever really knows everything because there is always a faster way of accomplishing something. “It’s a lot like learning another language,” Goldwhite said, “except that it always follows the rules, which is why I like it more than Spanish.” Goldwhite hopes to use his knowledge of these multiple languages to become a video game programmer. This growing field will allow him to combine his loves of art, computers, and science, working with physics behind video games. To him, seeing a building crumble or an object act as a gravity well is fascinating. He hopes to graduate from a university with an esteemed game programming or computer programming degree, enter the industry with a job designing the physics of games for a video game studio, and one day become independent and create his own games. Goldwhite’s detailed and long-term life plan integrates well-developed and selfAnastasia Velicescu taught passions that he has had since Senior Mac Goldwhite combines artistic and programming talhis youth.
ents in his work, and aspires to create games as a career.