My Crystal Ball Is Foggy
06 Sep 2019
What do you want to be when you grow up?
Do you remember that question? That really important one that all the adults stressed when you were a little kid? Where they would sit you down and have you write down your answer to display in the classroom?
Starting at the “top”
I remember that question. It stands out distinctly to me because for as long as I can remember I’ve never had an answer to it. I never really put much thought into the future. When I finished high school I came to college because that seemed like what a lot of people were doing and I didn’t know what else to do. At the time of my high school graduation, I had really enjoyed my AP calculus class so I started a degree in Mathematics. I figured if I were to be learning something, I might as well be learning the most fundamental things in the universe, right?
After a while thought I realized that I didn’t want to spend my time doing just pure mathematics my whole life so I considered just going “down the totempole” would be a decent way to figure out what I enjoy.
On my way down I came across something I didn’t know existed, someplace between maths and physics in my opinion. Computer science! I found it to be the perfect mix of getting to see mathematics in action while also being able to create things at the comfort of a desk.
Developing My Kit
Since adding the data science focus to my degree, I’ve started building up a toolkit, similar to the one I had for mathematics. So far it’s been just as much a chore to build my computer science toolkit as it was to build my mathematics one. A lot of learning the skills required to program and develop software and usually learning by making mistakes and leaving a trail of red behind me (pen and code error). Learning by making mistakes is hard. I don’t like doing things that way but I’ve found that as I build more and more complicated software it gets more satisfying to finally squash the last of the bugs keeping my program from working. Along the way I’ve learn a few skills specifically for engineering software but I find that the skills I look forward to developing are ones I can only start working towards one step at a time.
What The Future Holds
At times things go quickly or I feel rushed, I want to run blindly ahead to see what’s out there or attempt to finish a project feverishly to no avail. It’s times like those when I realize that what I need is patience. In my opinion, being able to take your time with a problem and carefully analyze each part of it in order to arrive at the correct solution or find the mistake made along the way is one of the most important skills I have been working on. Take a deep breath, read slowly and break things down. Rushing into a problem doesn’t help and usually gets you more lost than you can imagine. It might be that looking into a crystal ball to see my future might show me lost in the fog but I know that I won’t stop learning and developing my skills in software engineering, development and more.