Niwot salutatorian Siddartha Bushan talks linguistics

Technical-minded Siddartha Bushan never gave much thought to his grades during his four years as a student in Niwot's competitive International Baccalaureate program, so he was mostly surprised but also a little relieved when he learned that he was named the 2021 IB salutatorian. The Courier caught up with him shortly before graduation to hear his thoughts on his four years at Niwot High and what the next four-years has in-store.

LHVC: Did you know your class ranking before the announcement?

SB: I never thought about who the valedictorians would be, and then Mr. Rauschkolb showed up one day with a sign saying I'm salutatorian. It was never something I was aiming for. I did not want to be valedictorian. I don't want to give a speech at graduation.

LHVC: I heard that you are planning to study linguistics and computer science at the University of Illinois after graduation. What got you into linguistics?

SB: I've just really enjoyed studying foreign languages and just learning about languages too. Then for IB, one of the things we have to do is write an extended essay about a topic of our choice. And so I wrote mine on linguistics. I wrote it in Spanish about linguistics and minority languages in Spain. And I've also just worked on a few things involving linguistics and computers, too. And I really enjoyed all that stuff. So I thought it would be interesting to study more about it in college.

LHVC: The University of Illinois is also not a common choice for Colorado students. What drew you to the University of Illinois?

SB: One of the big things is that the computer science and linguistics program is not actually a double major. It's a single major that combines both. Because doing a double major in the two, I found is pretty difficult to do, just because there's almost no courses in common between them....The University of Illinois has a very strong Computer Science program.

LHVC: What do you want to do after you get your degree?

SB: I'm not really sure. I think I want to go to grad school afterward, and then after that, I don't really know. Probably industry, maybe not, we'll see.

LHVC: Thinking back to your time at Niwot, what have been some of your favorite classes? And then as a little follow up to that, what is a class that maybe you'd like to take over again, or you didn't want to take but ended up enjoying?

SB: I really enjoyed my Spanish classes, and they're one of the things that got me into linguistics. Same thing with computer science classes, like AP Computer Science and stuff. And I've been involved in robotics throughout high school following my interest in computer science and programming.

One of the classes, actually two classes, that I most enjoyed that I didn't think I would enjoy as much were my IB history classes. I took them mainly because I had to for IB, but I got really interested in them. And I'd love to take them again. They were just really interesting.

LHVC: You mentioned that you were involved in the school's robotics team. Obviously, with the COVID, it was hard to have in person competitions during the past 12 months. What was the final year of robotics like?

SB: We were scheduled to have in-person competitions this year, but they canceled them back in January, since they figured COVID wouldn't improve enough, and it didn't. So what they did instead was they created sort of at home challenges, or challenges you could do in your own school, or in our case, we have a separate building. Right now, we just do them in our own building, film them and upload them. And that was just time-based mainly, on who can do some obstacle courses, who can navigate the fastest. And I worked on that. In particular, I helped work on a navigation system using cameras to track the robot. And we actually ended up having the fastest times in the world for two of the five challenges and the second fastest time for the third challenge.

LHVC: Did you miss the in person competitions?

SB: Definitely. The in person competitions were really fun to go to. It was just a great experience. But I feel like they did a pretty good job with the home competitions. They really tried to keep people engaged.

LHVC: Is robotics something that you'd be interested in pursuing in college?

SB: There is a robotics club that I'm thinking of joining, because it just sounds fun. I really enjoyed working on robotics initially, just because the programming sort of comes to life. And that there's an actual robot you can see, and review everything that you've programmed.

LHVC: Are you doing anything fun this summer before you head off to the University of Illinois?

SB: This summer, I'm actually working on an internship at a robotics company.

LHVC: Is it Lefthand Robotics? I know it was just recently sold. Has that changed operations there much?

SB: It is. it just changed what we're working on because now we're not working on the product when we used to sell. We're now working on stuff for Toro. But it's overall pretty similar.

LHVC: What do you like to do when you're not in school or building robots?

SB: I like to program things in my free time. I've worked on a bunch of like side projects, programming-wise. One thing that got me interested in linguistics was a couple of years ago, I worked on a project where I was using a computer algorithm to look at the difference between languages and determine how similar different languages were. I spent quite a few weeks on that. I ended up creating a whole website to display it.

Then I've also programmed a lot of games, especially this last year with COVID. That's a thing I've done for the robotics team and just with friends. And then we played them since we can't meet up.

LHVC: Are you interested in going into game design or anything like that? Or is that just just more of a fun hobby?

SB: It's just more of a fun thing. I'm not sure I'd want to do it as a career.