"My computer science classes were not immediately rewarding, but in retrospect, they taught me the invaluable art of troubleshooting."
These two computer science courses, the second of which counted toward my Honors science requirement, were in many ways the most challenging I've taken - and certainly produced my lowest grades, but not for lack of effort! I approached coding in Java with the expectation that it would come fairly naturally to me because I had picked up Spanish easily in high school and excelled in writing, but quickly found that coding was an entirely different beast. I realized that the reason writing was easy for me is that I understood intuitively how people learn and think, but I had no idea how computers processed information. I also realized that communicating to computers was far less exciting to me than communicating for a human audience, however hypothetical that audience might be. Hitting this intellectual and motivational wall in a series of classes designed to winnow applicants to the computer science majors was frustrating and, frankly, discouraging.
However, the next year, I wrote my own R code through half a quarter of a statistics class only to realize in Week 5 that the codes were provided for us - I had made the leap to coding in a different language comfortably, and found that coding for the purpose of better understanding statistical relationships was interesting and even fun. A year after that, I faced a research question for my thesis that required sophisticated statistical analysis, and I was able to find the R packages I needed to test and run the right regressions and even to create a table in Latex to display my findings. The artifacts below are some of my code and the resulting table which appears in my thesis, some of my proudest work.
My computer science classes were not immediately rewarding, but in retrospect, they taught me the invaluable art of troubleshooting. Checking through my work through the process of debugging and reaching out to find help on user forums were practices without parallels I'd needed to pursue in my other work. Because of my computer science training, I know that if I feel confident that I can confront problems as they arise, I also feel more confident about diving into work that doesn't come naturally to me. This is how I managed to teach myself R, a language that was completely unfamiliar to me, without any formal training, and was able to create these 26 lines of code that are pretty much inscrutable to the uninitiated. CSE 142/3 was trial by fire, but I came through it with a skill set that will serve me well whatever I do.
However, the next year, I wrote my own R code through half a quarter of a statistics class only to realize in Week 5 that the codes were provided for us - I had made the leap to coding in a different language comfortably, and found that coding for the purpose of better understanding statistical relationships was interesting and even fun. A year after that, I faced a research question for my thesis that required sophisticated statistical analysis, and I was able to find the R packages I needed to test and run the right regressions and even to create a table in Latex to display my findings. The artifacts below are some of my code and the resulting table which appears in my thesis, some of my proudest work.
My computer science classes were not immediately rewarding, but in retrospect, they taught me the invaluable art of troubleshooting. Checking through my work through the process of debugging and reaching out to find help on user forums were practices without parallels I'd needed to pursue in my other work. Because of my computer science training, I know that if I feel confident that I can confront problems as they arise, I also feel more confident about diving into work that doesn't come naturally to me. This is how I managed to teach myself R, a language that was completely unfamiliar to me, without any formal training, and was able to create these 26 lines of code that are pretty much inscrutable to the uninitiated. CSE 142/3 was trial by fire, but I came through it with a skill set that will serve me well whatever I do.