Patchogue-Medford High School Computer Science teacher Kathy Bucaria took a team of three talented programmers to the St. Joseph's college Third Annual Programming Competition on May 16, 2003. Team members were Jeff Satterley, Scott Mulderig and Patrick Doutney. The students had 2 hours and 45 minutes to solve and test six difficult programming problems using the language C++. There were 18 teams of students from schools in Suffolk, Nassau and Queens Counties. The PM team solved 5 out of the 6 problems successfully. This put them in a 5 way tie for first place for points. They missed the top three by seconds as the final standings were based on the time the last program was submitted.

All three young men have taken every computer science course offered at Patchogue-Medford High School. These courses include Robotics Programming, Visual Basic Programming, HTML Programming, AP Computer Science A and AP Computer Science AB. All three students are seniors and plan to major in Computer Science in college.

Note: First Picture is Jeff Satterley, Mrs. Bucaria, Scott Mulderig and Patrick Doutney at the awards ceremony. The second photo was taken during the competition in the state of the art computer lab at St. Joseph's College. The PM team is in the center with their backs to the camera.