In the bonus room on the second floor of their house, Brandon Kerr would while away his time on the family’s desktop playing EarthBound or Sonic the Hedgehog or watching one of his favorite shows on YouTube.

Being ever curious about technology, he’d ask everyone in his house how the desktop worked. They didn’t know. They simply knew the desktop worked. That’s it.

“Why am I using something I don’t understand?” he’d often ask himself.

Only when he started his freshman year at Middle College at GTCC-High Point did he start to understand. As he sat in “Freshman Focus,” a required class his first semester, his teacher had everyone watch a video about a student who loved to create computer apps.

Sitting in the back of class, Brandon tuned in right away. After class, Brandon walked into the hallway and saw courses he could take, courses like computer programming and computer fundamentals.

He knew then that an answer he longed to discover was within reach. He later found out how his family’s desktop worked because of what he learned in and around what he and other students call H5, a classroom building on the GTCC campus in High Point.

His curiosity will now lead to a career.

The Inspiration of Remy

Brandon graduates Wednesday (May 28) at GTCC’s Koury Auditorium. This fall, Brandon will continue his academic deep dive into computers when he begins at N.C. State and majors in electrical engineering.

He wants to learn more about what makes a computer tick beyond typing words on a keyboard, hearing the soundtrack of Undertale and thinking immediately of its developer Toby Fox.

But what gave him the direction he needed were the classes at GTCC-High Point. He learned how to decipher and understand the language that makes computers programs run.  By his junior year, Brandon learned Python. By his senior year, he learned Java. Ask Brandon what he knows about coding, and he’ll talk about cooking — and a cartoon rat named Remy.

Brandon has watched Pixar’s 2007 film, “Ratatouille” countless times, sometimes with Fudgie, his family’s toy poodle, snuggled by his side. Brandon admits he can’t cook. At all. But he can code, and Remy inspired him to tackle what he didn’t understand.

“It’s one of the weirdest ways to inspire somebody, right?” Brandon says. “Imagine being down in the dumps and thinking you can’t do anything. But then, you tell yourself, ‘You can do anything! You have seen a rat cook!’

“That’s when I imagined that coding was a lot like cooking, and the more I thought about it, the more it engaged me in the process,” he says. “My programs are like my recipes. I have a chance to get them out of my head and try out all sorts of ideas. The process of cooking is very experimental. So is coding.”

The ‘Great Shift’ of Discovery

Brandon doesn’t think of Remy all the time when he’s creating. But if it’s a project close to his heart, he says he puts on “the true chef hat.” In his college essay for N.C. State, Brandon wrote about the connection between cooking and coding — and how Remy helped.

“I usually run the code to make sure the customer — the terminal — doesn't have a problem with the dish, which it usually does since I always have a mountain of errors by the time I'm done,” he wrote. “I then go for a walk to think about my next dish, striving to be like the rat who loves to cook.”

His teachers at the Middle College have helped. Ask him which ones, and Brandon mentions several. Like his math teacher Masroof Shah.

“I call it the Great Shift,” he says. “I didn’t like math, and COVID just made it worse. I didn’t understand what was going on, but my math classes and being around my peers made me realize I had to face the problem head-on.

“Now, I like math,” he says. “I don’t know what happened, but I started to like it after a time. Coding and math go hand in hand. If you like one, you have to like the other.”

Finding Your ‘A Game’

Brandon found that out with the help of Jessica Bennett, the GTCC associate professor who taught him trigonometry, pre-calculus and calculus I.

Last month, Bennett invited Brandon and Nesther Bustamante and Ryan Blancas Hernandez, two of Brandon’s closest friends at the Middle College, to put together a presentation at GTCC-Jamestown to help students become more interested in math.

Brandon and his two friends decided to talk about imaginary numbers. They divided up the work and prepared a 20-minute PowerPoint presentation. Right when they began their presentation, they saw her walk in —Ann Simpson, the dean of Science, Technology, Engineering and Math programs at GTCC.

“We were sweating bullets,” Brandon says days later. “When I saw her, I told Ryan and Nesther, ‘We have to be on our A game.’”

They were. When they finished, Bennett had a message for Brandon and his friends.

“She could see how nervous we were because we had never experienced something like that,” Brandon says. “She told us, ‘I’m proud of y’all. I really am.’”

  Brandon thanks his teachers for helping him find his future. His close friends like Ryan and Nesther, too. And of course, Remy. The rat who can cook.

“Remy takes chances, and he’s confident,” Brandon says. “That confidence and that execution is what I strive for.”