Before ITAM there was another school, and it explains a lot about how I work. The Centro de Estudios Científicos y Tecnológicos No. 9 “Juan de Dios Bátiz” of the Instituto Politécnico Nacional, “Voca 9” to everyone, on Mar Mediterráneo street in Popotla, Mexico City. I entered on the second Monday of August 2018 and left on the second-to-last Friday of July 2021.
A high school that is also a degree
The IPN runs a bivalent model: six terms that count at once as high school and as a technical career. At the end you receive a Bachiller Técnico Bivalente certificate and, with social service and an approved graduation option, the title of Técnico en Programación with a professional licence. Mine was issued in December 2022, seventeen months after graduating, a normal delay given the pandemic backlog.
In practice it means carrying two curricula at once. On one side the full scientific core: Algebra, Geometry and Trigonometry, Analytic Geometry, Differential and Integral Calculus, Probability and Statistics, four terms of Physics and four of Chemistry, plus philosophy, history, communication and six terms of English. On the other, from the third term on, the professional programming track.
The pillars of the programming track
My cohort followed the IPN’s Plan 2008, whose general competence is blunt: develop software applications applying current methodologies, standards and tools. It is organized in five pillars:
- Object-oriented programming, from the third term, and later Agile Programming Methods. This is where I learned to think in classes, responsibilities and interfaces before writing a line.
- Relational databases: designing normalized schemas and exploiting them with data manipulation languages. The direct ancestor of what I do today with SQL in a warehouse.
- Web development: Web Programming and Services, the technical course with the most credits in the plan, followed by Web and Application Security.
- Testing and software quality: Introduction to Test Engineering, the Test Automation elective and Basic Software Engineering. The plan even has an intermediate exit that certifies you as a Software Quality Verifier. Learning to test code at seventeen is one of the reasons I cannot imagine a pipeline without tests today.
- Projects: an IT Project Lab every technical term, with IT Project Management and the option of graduating through an integrative project.
Plus Introduction to Distributed Systems and Software Support, which seemed distant at the time and are my job now.
The reputation, with numbers
The Bátiz’s reputation is not Politécnico folklore. Admission is through the COMIPEMS exam, and the CECyT 9 cut-off was 102 to 106 correct answers out of 128 every year between 2019 and 2023: the highest of any IPN campus and about ten points above the second, CECyT 13. The press describes it as the IPN campus that is hardest to get into, and in 2012 El Universal reported it as Mexico’s best high school in the national ENLACE test for the fifth year in a row, with 92 % of its students at the excellent level in mathematics. The principal at the time summed it up with no magic formula: “dedication and discipline”.
In the community the reputation has been the same for decades: “the most demanding” academically, the school where “you can feel more pressure than at university”. I lived it as described. Eight or nine courses per term, departmental exams, project labs that ship no matter what. What you learn, more than any language, is to sustain a heavy workload for three years without letting go.
What I built
In the project labs I wrote Java desktop apps (a calculator, an inventory and cargo manager for a shipping company), hand-coded HTML5 sites with no assistants, and MySQL database-design exercises. The final project was a 2D web videogame in PHP: an open world where kids had to solve chemistry exercises to move up a level. My first language was Java; then came C and C++, PHP, JavaScript, Python and SQL. I also won first place at a school fair, though with an environmental-awareness project rather than a programming one.
Finishing in a pandemic
Half of my technical career was online: from March 2020 to the end, in July 2021. Project labs became shared repositories and video calls, and the graduation ceremony was virtual. I do not recommend it, but it taught me to work remotely and asynchronously before that was my working reality.
What I take with me
That discipline trains like any muscle, and that the Bátiz is a gym. That software testing is not a luxury but part of the craft. And that arriving at ITAM with three years of programming and databases behind me meant the Data Science degree started, for me, with an advantage on the technical side and all the humility on the mathematical one.