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There’s a perception that there’s two types of programmers: ones who were programming earlier than you and those who started much later. Those who program earlier seem like geniuses compared to the little experience that I have. I fall in the latter camp; it’s only been a few years since I printed my first “Hello World” in C, but it feels like a decade of learning since then. Like many students in OSU’s post-bacc computer science program, I will be receiving my second bachelor’s degree at the end of this quarter after I finish CS 467.
My first degree was in biochemistry, and I started working biotech and healthcare jobs since I graduated. I was part of the group of students who were told by their parents that the only successful and stable job out there is being a doctor. I dragged my feet at every step, not wanting to become a doctor. I took nearly every doctor-adjacent job out there that I could have done without getting an extra degree. At every step, I kept asking myself, “why isn’t our technology more advance?” or “isn’t there a better way to do this with tech?”. The problems that I wanted to solve weren’t the ones directly working patients, the problems that I wanted to solve were the ones that would make the lives of both healthcare workers and patients better through technology.
During the pandemic, work slowed to a crawl for a few months. I decided to take this opportunity of free time to learn how to code on my own so that I can help update one of the systems that I worked with everyday. Learning on my own was no joke. The long hours of learning how to crawl: figuring out which type of loop to use, what a variable is and how to initialize it, why my program kept crashing, and the errors. The endless errors that kept emerging, like how the thought kept bubbling up to the surface that I’m not like those programmers who started coding earlier than I because they were born with a transistor in their mouth.
There is one important thing I learned from working in healthcare that got me through the tough times of learning how to code, and that is compassion. To me, compassion isn’t about taking easy on yourself when you fail. It is the ability to accept that everyone, including myself starts somewhere. It’s the ability to accept that I may not be smart now, but it doesn’t mean that I am not smart. I accepted that I wasn’t those predestined programmers and that I didn’t know the answer to every problem. That program that I created never worked the way it should have, but I learned to iterate and learned to manage imposter syndrome, which never leaves.
There are two things that I hold on to to ground myself whenever those feelings pop up: self-compassion and my goals. When I started at OSU, I gave myself one year to find an internship or, best care scenario, a job. Luckily, both happened. I slowed down my progress in school to focus on work, but now I’m ready to finish up the degree. I’m excited to try learning something new and try new tech stacks. My main goal now is to finish this course and have fun along the way.
-Dan
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