He's a Spreadsheet Champ but, Ladies, Certainly No Nerd
August 10, 2006
By Ian Shapira
Washington Post

There are champions: World Series champions, Super Bowl champions, Westminster Kennel Club champions. Also, Microsoft Excel champions.

Jeffrey Lear, 17, who will be a senior at Gar-Field High School in Woodbridge, is the U.S. Microsoft Excel champion. He earned a free trip last weekend to Walt Disney World because of his performance in March on a certification exam that measures a person's skills with the Microsoft spreadsheet application. Lear, who took the certification test as part of a high school computer class, scored the highest out of more than 40,000 U.S. students, and with the fastest time.

So, last weekend, Lear—who would like to make it known to the girls at Gar-Field that he is not obsessed with spreadsheet functions—vied for "best in the world" in Excel against 17 students from around the world at Disney World. He lost—Tristam Horn, 26, of New South Wales in Australia, won—but still, there are only so many 17-year-olds who aren't involved in sports or extracurricular activities who can claim they are a U.S. champion in anything, except maybe loafing around.

"I never would expect that I would win this. I've always enjoyed computers. It comes naturally to me," said Lear, who was good-humored and somewhat ambivalent about his micro-celebrity. "But I don't want to be known as some dork, because I'm not. I would never brag about this to the ladies. It's a plus, but it's for my employment purposes."

For someone named the U.S. Microsoft Excel champion, Lear in fact does not really fit any preconceived notions. First of all, he had no idea that the certification exam he took as part of his class was part of an international competition. Second, he notes, he really only uses the computer to surf the Internet, and his true passion is cars, specifically Acuras. (He drives an Acura Legend, works at an Acura dealership and belongs to an Acura Web forum.)

And, unlike many other advanced high school students these days, Lear does not play sports year-round and does not boast membership in an endless roster of résumé-packing extracurricular clubs. When he's not shuttling customers to and from their homes to the Woodbridge Acura dealership, he's working as a server at Daks Grill in Dale City.

"I barely use Excel. I just took the exam and did well," he said. "When they notified me that I won and was U.S. champion, I didn't believe it. I thought this has got to be a scam."

Lear said he is not sure what profession he'd like to pursue. Maybe, he said, he'll be an architect.

His class at Gar-Field on computer programs and mastering Microsoft applications is becoming something of an educational trend, said David Saedi, president and chief executive of Utah-based Certiport Inc., which has a partnership with Microsoft and devises the exams. "We find that four out of five jobs require computer skills. People without those skills are not ready to enter the job force or be as producing," he said. "The fusion of technology into the curriculum is a huge issue."

Lear's mother and father, who work at the U.S. Postal Service as a human resources specialist and a letter carrier, respectively, are proud of their son, and his mom wishes that she could absorb some of his Excel expertise. His mother, Patricia "Susie" Bamsey, said that when she was recently hired for a new position at the Postal Service, she was asked in the interview whether she knew Excel.

When she told them that she did not know the application that well—but that her son was one of the world's best—she got a confused reaction. "They thought, 'Is she trying to feed us a line or what?' " Bamsey recalled. "I told them that I'll make my son give me lessons."

This story originally appeared in the August 10, 2006 edition of The Washington Post.