I am a high school student majoring in AP Computer Science (at my high school, students choose majors), and last Friday, my major class took a field trip to NJIT to visit their computer science and computer engineering majors. On the bus back, we were thinking about other tech-related field trip ideas and that’s when my big idea came up: a weeklong field trip to Cupertino in June to attend WWDC. After all, attending WWDC was one of the things I really wanted to do (I literally watched it in PiP in class last year), although last year and before, I didn’t have enough programming knowledge to submit an app to the Student Challenge, and didn’t have many connections with people who could get me in. This year is different. First of all, I am making a lot more apps in SwiftUI and Xcode and even publishing them to the App Store, all of which look native on any device from the iPhone mini to the Mac Studio, and know people who could help me get into WWDC including a WSJ tech reviewer, and even have emailed Craig Federighi and received a brief response from him. Now, I think it would be amazing if my whole class could go to WWDC next year. A lot of them use Apple products and I think would really enjoy it even if Swift isn’t their go-to language. But, how realistic is this?
Like you might have guessed, our school is in New Jersey. However, we have been doing other long-distance trips like a two-week trip to Europe in April, so I think this trip is certainly in the realm of possibility and a good amount of students could be interested in going to Cupertino. However, it would most certainly require most of the cost to be paid by the students. Could Apple fund part of the trip? I feel this would be good for Apple’s viewpoint on education and shows Apple takes students seriously. Moreover, meeting Tim Cook and Craig Federighi in front of my whole class would most certainly be a surreal experience. If you think this isn’t a realistic idea, what do you think is the best way for me to be able to attend WWDC this year?