Junior Winner - Max de Bourcier, age 10, Jersey
2014 Commonwealth Essay Competition
Being a Team Player
I am not a team player. When you are ten years old, everyone tries to make you join a team because
“It’s good for you”. You see every time I try to take part in a team it doesn’t go as planned.
I tried to join a brass band, it went well until we did a band trip. Last year, after the Easter holiday
there was a three day band camp in the mountains. I really didn’t want to go but my mum forced me
to. The drive there was terrifying as we had too many kids in a Land Rover. We went up and up the
mountain on a windy road just wide enough for the car, with a sheer drop on the right hand side. We
got to 8000 feet and I was sick when we got out. We stayed in a cabin with no running water or
electricity. We all had to share one room with mattresses in a row. There was an outside toilet. If
this is what team playing is all about then it is definitely not for me. I absolutely hated the trumpet
afterwards.
My mum sent me to a football club so that I could be a team player but I just enjoyed kicking the ball
on my own and begged her not to go back. Why would you want to stand in a freezing field? If this is
being a team player it’s definitely not for me.
My mum took me to the rugby club and I saw my friends playing but I said that I really didn’t want to
do it. We had a bacon roll and then we went home.
I like doing things on my own. I have always liked computers. I have lots of computers and at the age
of ten I can do some coding in python, basic and a bit of C+. Python is used for websites, apps and
google play. Basic is one of the oldest computer languages. C+ is used for high-speed graphics.
My mum took me to Cern in Geneva to see the Large Hadron Collider. I saw how all the people
worked and lived there and I thought that was a place that I would like to work. Cern has everything
you need all in one place. You can live and work there. There are restaurants and also vending
machines where scientists can get everything they need to survive such as food, drinks and
shampoo.
I learnt how the Large Hadron Collider works and saw some experiments like what happens when
you super cool a magnet and I made my own version of a particle detector and entered a
competition. When I grow up I would like to be a particle physicist and discover dark matter.
Cern was full of people who work together on big projects like looking for the Higgs Boson so I
suppose you could say that they are a type of team. I wonder how many of them were on the school
football team?
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