How to not stay stagnant.

Cover image from https://might-could.com/essays/how-to-overcome-imposter-syndrome/

Table of Contents

1. Intro

   • Why Doing CS Outside of School is a Game Changer

2. School Life

   • Graduating in CS: Observations

3. Why bother?

   • School Assignments vs. Enjoying CS

4. Fall in Love with CS

   • CS is an Art
   • Wanting to Learn More

5. My First Hackathon Adventure

   • Imposter Syndrome

6. Why It Matters

   • Comparing CS to Liberal Arts
   • Keeping Things Fun and Creative in STEM

7. Wrapping It Up

   • Be Creative

DO CS OUTSIDE OF SCHOOL.

Ok, pretty obvious thing to say right? Well, I recently graduated from a 3-Year DEC in Computer Science, and what I noticed is that the majority of my classmates just did the school work and nothing more.

In my anecdote, I'm talking about a degree very heavy on the practical aspect (coding, security, etc.). My cohort spent the last 3-years learning to code.

Doing a bit of snooping, I saw that so far, only 5 students (including myself) in my graduating year have made at least 1 commit on GitHub. While yes, there are 2-3 students who haven't made commits that have internships right now, most don't, and of those that don't, they don't seem to be working on any projects.

Ok, what's your point?

When you do something for school, unless you really make it your own, 99% of the time you won't really have any outward joy coming from it. Let's say you're doing a Cal assignment, an English paper, or even coding a calculator for class, you're pretty much just following a set of instructions to get a grade.

Where's the fun in that?

If Computer Science is something you want to do as a job (even if it's just because you saw a TikTok telling you that you'll make at least $100k straight out of school), you need to be in love with it. CS is always growing, always expanding, if your only effort is doing your assignments and moving through the motions, CS is just going to be miserable for you.

I want to love CS

To fall in love with CS, you have to do it on your own time. The way I see it, Computer Science is an Art. It's not some magic science that can do x and y, it's an art and you have to find your style.

You can't just do as your teacher tells you and nothing more, you have to want to learn and improve.

"Well I don't want to learn more." Trust me, if this is the field you're interested in, you will want to learn more.

How I did it

This is a big anecdote, if you don't care to read through it, it's not that important to my point.

For me, it was going to my first hackathon. At the time, I was really tired of the monotonous coding assignments that were essentially just "do this and then that". Out of nowhere my friend invited me to PharmaHacks 2024, a Life-Science hackathon. I had done some personal projects and whatnot, but nothing special, and I was procrastinating doing more and attending hackathons for months, so with my friends invite, I said screw it and we applied.

PharmaHacks is a hackathon organized by McGill, so I felt a bit insecure going into it, but to my surprise I got accepted and was already feeling more confident and excited.

When we got there, they presented the challenges to us. One was a neuroscience challenge where you had to decode Calcium Imaging data of mice and use machine learning to predict their position*. The other one was to use DNA and machine learning to predict the severity of covid that an individual would have.

Wow. My friend and I felt that we were in way over our heads. Neuroscience and Genomics? We were going against University students in their final years of Neuro, Biology, Software Engineering, etc., we were just two CEGEP students who liked to code. Thankfully, in our team we had 2 neuroscience students & 1 other CS student.

I won't dive into much more of the event, but we came out in 4th place and ever since, I've been doing as much CS outside of school as possible.

You spoke a lot and I got bored, make your point

Ok ok, I get it, I tend to yap a lot my bad. Basically, Computer Science (and all the other disciplines in relation) is not an easy field by any means, but it will be a lot harder if you only do the bare minimum of meeting your schools requirements.

Take Liberal Arts students for example, do you think they're only doing their schoolwork and calling it a day? No, for the most part they're really into cinema and/or literature. For us, it's hackathons, it's personal projects, etc.

Just because it's STEM doesn't mean it is in a world of it's own. We are all people who get bored, do things that will inspire your creativity in the field you love.