The
Woes of Computer Science
Women
in IT
What
better way is there to introduce this blog post than to explain to you lovely
readers why we’ve taken a month-long hiatus from Why Can’t We Have Everything?
Long story short, it’s because we’re women in IT. More specifically, we’re
women pursuing collegiate degrees in IT. For all you non-nerds out there, IT
stands for the organized chaos of Information Technology.
Basically,
you know that summer course that Angela was jabbering about in the previous
post? Yeah... definitely should have been paying attention during that time the
professor was discussing the differences between cache memory structures. -_-
(this represents your eyes glazing over from the last sentence). Long story
short (once again), the high-speed and condensed summer version of what is one
of the most intensely challenging courses in our Computer Science curriculum,
AKA Computer Architecture, is FINALLY over. We passed, and that’s all you need
to know about that. In fact, we feel pretty proud of ourselves for taking on
something extremely labor-intensive and making it out alive-- 6 weeks, 7
homework assignments, a midterm, and a 16-page final later.
Aaaaaaanyways,
we digress. So the meat of this post is basically a crazily oxymoronic rant
about both the woes and wonders of our lives as young women working toward
bachelor degrees of Computer Science. The day we signed those matriculation
forms in August of 2010, we were committing ourselves to 4 years of misery
dispersed with random flecks of extreme joy.
In
our opinion, computer science is one of, if not, the hardest subject to major
in. For other majors, you have prior experience of those subjects and years of
preparation from high school. English, math, art, music, languages - subjects
like that are going to be easier on your brain solely because you’ve had
experience in them before, especially if you are not a fast learner. For
example, how different is learning English in college than English in high
school? Not very. It may be harder and of course more is expected, but it’s all
along the same line of thinking that these subjects are built upon at a younger
age. Students have learned the fundamentals of math and English in their
formative years and on the other (read: our) side of the spectrum, high schools
offer a couple computer classes teaching typing skills, “How to use basic
Microsoft Office products” and, maybe if you’re lucky, “How to use Adobe
Creative Suite products”. By all means, we are not disregarding the difficulty
of other majors, as they are all difficult in their own ways. Kayla, for one,
is glad that she doesn’t have to memorize any more arbitrary historical dates
or write pages and pages of lab reports and Angela, for another, enjoys not
writing countless essays with in-text citations about various Medieval texts
and their meanings. But as it gets harder for the brain to learn new
information, it may be a little late to learn a completely new branch of
knowledge, especially something that involves programming.
Speaking
of, and much to our dismay, CS consists primarily of computer programming. If
you are just starting out with programming at the ripe old age of 18, it will
be extremely challenging to convert to that mindset. (Unless you’re some
super-genius or something.) To succeed in programming, you will have to acquire
this nitpicky, step-by-step thinking and master it. And the only way to get
better is to practice. We would say that learning programming is like learning
and excelling at the combination of spelling, grammar, logic, and a foreign
language. While those subjects may seem easy to some, note that one missing or
extra curly brace can, in simple terms, cause your program to explode. (Also,
did we mention that a logic class doesn’t exist in grade schools?) While
programming gives you the capability to do anything, that is exactly the
drawback. The tools that you can use are numerous to the point of overwhelming.
You start with a blank slate, an idea, and the task of constructing it. So how
easy would it be to draw a picture if you were given every single writing
utensil in existence, but have never learned to write, much less draw? Some
rules: you can’t use tracing paper and the things you look up online only show
you the result of what other people have drawn, not the techniques they used to
produce it.
Though
it seems programming could give the devil a run for its money, there is one
positive thing about it. And it’s the feeling of accomplishment when
you’ve completed an assignment or even just had a small segment of code NOT
cause a segmentation fault (if you don’t know what that is, consider yourself
lucky and leave it at that). Ever hear the phrase, “curiosity killed the cat?”
Yeah... just think about that. Although, we suppose there is one more plus side.
College
for most is supposed to be ‘going out with a bang’ into adulthood and high
school is allegedly just something you have to get through’. For us, the
transition of making CS click in our brains and adjusting to its non-standard
model of teaching has been seeming more along the lines of the ‘something you
have to get through’. Of course, it is our own faults. It is in our DNA to
choose one of the most challenging majors ever. If you know us personally, this
drive to do insane things is just typical behavior of ours. :)
But
now, as juniors, we are finally starting to be able to see the light at the end
of the tunnel. What we mean by this, is that we’ve managed to build a
foundation in programming and now it’s time to dive into the other areas of
Computer Science that we have been looking forward to this whole time. Now the
only problem is wondering if we’ve missed some important train that could have
been a bit of help to us up until this point...
Anyways,
thanks so much for putting up with this semi-rant. Use the comment section to
rant about your own major or anything else! We’d love to see it!
Your
good friends in the search for everything, Kayla & Angela
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