Dominic King
Bishop O’Connell High School
One of Dominic King’s best memories of his grandmother was the time she taught him multiplication and division during a flight from Chicago to Phoenix. He was 6 and fell in love with math.
He was the kid who built elaborate Lego structures and saved the instruction manuals. At 11, he built his first computer using tutorials he found online. The summer after his sophomore year, he was selected for the Virginia Governor’s School for Mathematics, Science and Technology.
He describes math as comforting. “You have a problem, and you form a methodology to solve it,” says the McLean resident, 18, who finished high school with a 4.6 GPA and plans to major in computer science at Duke University. “There are steps to follow; there’s a routine. Even if there’s not a clear way through, you can fall back on things that you know.”
At the start of the pandemic, King talked his grandfather through how to use Zoom and FaceTime. Soon, elderly neighbors were asking him to help set up their Amazon Echos and other devices. Realizing how much senior citizens could benefit from technology guidance, he started Project Digitize the Gap, a nonprofit that helps older people with in-home network setup, security and cybersafety. He recruited classmates as volunteers and built a website with free tutorials.
“It’s a great idea, especially for those [older] generations that want to be tech-savvy,” says Bill Betthauser, King’s economics teacher at Bishop O’Connell. “He has a positive, upbeat attitude, really wanting to help other people.”
The summer after his junior year, King landed an internship with the chair of George Mason University’s Cybersecurity Engineering program, where he investigated 5G security protocols and collaborated with researchers from the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research.
As a senior, he played catcher for Bishop O’Connell’s baseball team after spending much of his junior spring in the dugout. But he played a vital role that season, too: The coach had him analyze the opposing team’s pitching patterns—a job ideally suited to his strengths.
“It was analogous to what I was doing with cybersecurity,” he says. “I called it ‘hacking the game.’ ”