Tech whizz graduates at 19

Benjamin's story originally featured in the Eastern Courier and online on stuff.co.nz. 

At 19 years old, Benjamin Denham had already completed a bachelor's degree in ICT, designed a working app for a major telecommunications company, and led courses on software development.

The Half Moon Bay local was just 16 years old when he started his degree at MIT, having completed high school early.

Chris Mayhew, Senior Lecturer in ICT at MIT, says that Benjamin is "simply an outstanding student."

"He's easily the best I have seen in my 13 years at MIT. Not only is he a personable young man, but he is also a very gifted student."

For Benjamin, IT was an obvious career choice. "It became clear early on that IT was where I wanted to go," he says. "I wanted to be a software developer, and I wanted to get the qualification to do it."

"I was comfortable with computers, I grew up playing computer games. Basically one weekend I thought, 'what is this programming thing?', and I found some tutorials online," he says.

"I got hooked on this whole idea of starting with nothing, I type in some stuff in the computer, and suddenly the computer is doing what I want it to do. I could do anything."

"I learned so much. I stopped playing computer games and started doing programming in all my spare time."

When Benjamin was fourteen, he made an app for his church. He also signed up for one of the world's first MOOCs (Massive Open Online Course) through Stanford University, and earned a holiday job building Facebook applications.

He started his internship at Catalyst, an open source software company, when he was 18 years old, juggling work with his study.

"I really enjoyed doing the projects. I'd learn something one week, and then literally the next week, there was some task that needed to be done at my job which needed that exact skillset. It worked."

For his final year project, he worked at Catalyst as lead primary developer on a real working app for a major telecommunications company. He earned 100% for his final assessment.

"My main job was making the app work, basically building the glue that's connecting the user interfaces to the underlying systems. I made sure that it all worked correctly and logically. There was a large multi-step form that had to handle a whole lot of cases."

"I really enjoy what I'm doing here. It's always challenging. My short term plan is do a lot of everything. Which is why I enjoy working for Catalyst; I'm working for up to five different companies at a time with different systems and varying challenges. I don't want to specialise too early, I want a different breadth of experience."

While he was at MIT, Benjamin co-designed and co-ran coding workshops for high school students, working with Minecraft programming challenges and web development. He's used those skills to manage professional development courses at his current job.

"Doing the project and getting the job is more exciting to me than the certificate," he says.

"I feel the stuff we're learning at MIT is geared towards how you're going to be useful in an IT company, and actually produce results. You had to think about what people were going to want to use your software for, and how it was going to work for them. You had to apply it to the kind of problems you face in the workplace rather than theoretical problems that no one actually does in practice."

"When you can take that academic learning back out into a workplace, suddenly everything makes sense," he says.

Benjamin will graduate with a Bachelor of Information and Communication Technologies degree on Saturday 28 May 2016, along with 1,072 other people as part of MIT's 2016 Graduation.

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