Computer Science

First off, it’s been a while. I’ll try to write more often from now on.

It’s been two months since I set foot into my first college classes. I was, and still am, very excited to learn more about the vast field of computer science. To be honest, however, I couldn’t help feeling a few chills down my spine when my instructors repeatedly drove home that machine problems would constitute a sizable portion of the introductory course, calling them the meat and cheese of the class. I wasn’t very good at programming, and although I certainly wanted to become a better programmer, I secretly hoped that computer science couldn’t merely be trivialized to solving machine problems day in and day out.

When I scrolled through the major’s curriculum, It made me happy that computer science was so much more than programming. It warmed me inside that I chose a major that would transform me into a well-rounded, versatile engineer. I came to UIUC to gain a deeper and more profound understanding of how we manage data and allocate computing resources in an efficient manner. I left a cozy home 1,872 miles away to study computer science, not programming. And although I’m spending most of my first year grinding out machine problems with classmates, I look forward to some of the theoretical classes that I’ll take in the future. Writing code is fun and enjoyable, but learning why the aforementioned code works the way it does enhances the experience tenfold. I feel that the best of computer science is still yet to come.