Two and a half weeks after term start, and a quarter of the way through to the end of the project. In my original undergrad studies, I had a full year to work on my senior project on a project topic I had chosen ahead of time with people that I had known for a while. Now, I’m working with people I’ve never been within a thousand miles of, on a project whose topic I didn’t know until there were only ten weeks left in the term. The project itself uses tools and technologies that I haven’t even touched. Hoo boy. I felt as though ten years wouldn’t be enough time.
AAAAAAAAAAAAaaa… Deep breaths…
When I saw what project I was assigned to, I immediately regretted putting it as my top pick for project choice. The project I’m working on uses C# (no experience) to develop a library in the .NET framework (no experience) that uses machine learning (no experience) to predict travel time of emergency vehicles for professionally used software (the project quality actually has real world implications??). What made me think that I could do it when I was signing up?
It was pretty obvious to me that there was one main reason for my anxiety: I felt like I had no idea what I was doing. My inexperience with the core tools and technologies that we were going to use culminated in a fear of disappointing my project partners and a complete lack of self confidence in my own skills and knowledge. Were we supposed to know C# and .NET frameworks? Were we supposed to already have experience with machine learning? Would I need to pretend to know what I’m doing in meetings while quietly trying to learn everything on the side?
Well, there’s little point in stressing. Or rather, the stress that I feel is better off being channeled into something useful. The first thing that I usually do when I encounter something that causes me a ton of anxiety is just do a quick once-over and skim the contents. Then… I completely ignore it. I pretend it doesn’t exist for a bit, go off and do something that I find enjoyable. Play some games with friends, go for a swim, maybe take a nap after a filling meal. After a bit, I come back and take a look again. It’s still stressful, but at least now I’ve seen it and know what to expect to a certain extent. Sort of similar to how a horror movie is less scary the second time around, now that you know what to expect, you know?
I actually kinda know what I’m doing
The second time, it is easier to actually identify what is and what is not stress-worthy. Looking back at the project description, the only real technical qualification requirement was to have strong experience with object oriented programming. Not a problem, I’ve been using Python, Java, and C for years now. Oh, what’s that? C# is very similar to Java? Suddenly, learning C# doesn’t seem like such a hurdle anymore. Let’s do a quick search on how difficult it will be to learn machine learning. Oh, wow, Microsoft has a machine learning .NET framework and tutorials to go along with it. Yeah, learning on the fly is tough, but I realized that I actually have a solid knowledge base and there are so many useful resources that I can use.
Another major way I was able to relax more with this project was by speaking with my project partners. Going in, I thought that I would be way behind in terms of experience, but it turns out that we were all pretty much in the same boat. None of us had used the tools we were going to use and all had the same worries. To be honest, hearing that was both comforting and terrifying. I was glad that I wasn’t missing anything that I was supposed to have, but it was nerve wracking realizing that there was no one in the group that could act as a crutch. Knowing that we were together on this and there to help each other with roadblocks definitely offset that discomfort though. Talking it out with people is, in general, a great way to alleviate stress and something that I definitely need to do more often.
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