Diving In

It was almost exactly 6 years ago that I decided to change careers. I had gone to school to study classical piano, and had been teaching music at a university for eight years. My daughter just turned one. I’ll get into all the reasons I decided to make a change in another post, but for now let’s just say it was time.

I started thinking about things I could do, and a memory started to emerge of when I was in the third grade. My parents bought a Commodore 64, and it came with a book on BASIC programming. I started reading it. There were sample programs that I could copy and run myself. I found it fascinating, and I remember spending hours making silly text games that I would make my parents play. I made a program that was supposed to pick winning lottery numbers, which obviously didn’t work, but it was fun. I also remember getting into some early computer games (all on floppy disks). One of my favorites was called “Impossible Mission.” I loved that computer generated voice saying “Another visitor. Stay awhile. Stay forever!”

It was right around the same time that I also started piano lessons, which I also loved. I ended up studying music in college, and graduate school. But now that I was looking for a new career, I realized I had the opportunity to see what might have happened if I had decided to do computer science instead.

So I decided to see if programming was something I could possibly learn and enjoy. I found several free tutorials and websites including FreeCodeCamp, which I really liked because it was slightly challenging, but not impossible to get through the lessons, and the lessons were fun. I used CodePen, so I didn’t really have to do some of the initial setup that can be kind of annoying and frustrating for beginners, and I could just get right into writing JavaScript, HTML, and CSS.

After working on FreeCodeCamp for about a year, I took my first programming class. Even though it was called “intro to programming,” I was intimidated on the first day when I found out that I would be programming in C++, which I heard was difficult. I had never had to think about types or pointers or garbage collection or any of that. But even though there were moments of frustration, I loved every minute of that class, and the next class, and the next class.

I found the overlap between music and programming surprising. I had developed some meta-skills from studying music for so many years that turned out to be useful in programming. Perhaps the most important skill that I learned from doing music was perseverance. I knew that even if I couldn’t do something right now, by breaking the problem down into smaller units and conquering each unit one at a time, I would eventually succeed.

I found that I could get into a flow state while programming, where I could sit and do it for hours without really getting bored, and time passed really quickly.The same thing used to happen when I practiced the piano, and I knew that was a good sign that my brain was drawn to this activity. Sometimes I felt like I was working on some really complicated machine that only a small number of brilliant people, including myself could understand. It felt amazing to be able to get the computer to do something I wanted it to do, even simple things like sort a list of numbers.

There were other skills I learned from being a musician like frustration tolerance, creative problem solving, and resilience that I had developed in music school were coming in handy as a computer science student.

After a year or so of taking one class a term, I was pretty sure that I was going to be able to get through the degree, and that I was probably even going to enjoy most of it. Now that I’m in my last term of the program, I can say that I was right. It has been a lot of fun to take all of these classes. Even the hard ones (and there were some hard ones!), and even the difficult and stressful times were still satisfying and even fun.