By Day a Student, By Night a Codebuster

J’N B DPEFCVTUFS <- a Caesar cipher: each letter is shifted by +1 letter.

By day, I’m a high school student. By night, I’m a codebuster. As a modern-day detective in the world of ciphers, my free time is spent unscrambling gibberish to uncover secret messages concealed behind layers of alphabetic substitution.

When I picked up cryptography last summer, I started with simple Caesar ciphers before advancing to challenging Patristocrat ciphers. To solve these, I have to spot words within words and imagine invisible breaks to make sense of the chaos and generate clues that propel me towards the solution.

Even when a code may initially seem uncrackable, I am confident that by staying calm and keeping my mind open, I will reach the solution––whether it be through intense calculations, analyzing letter frequency, uncovering word patterns, or a simple creative spark. For me, the thrill of cracking a code lies not just in the eureka moment of a solved cipher, but in going through the process itself.

From cryptography, I’ve learned that creativity is more than just about coming up with new ideas; it’s also about seeing what’s already there in a new way. Whenever I find myself in a difficult situation, I can count on my codebusting skills to help me assess it patiently and think creatively––maybe the right answer is just a single shift away.