I walked into Harvard Yard’s gates in the fall of 2016 as an eager, a-bit-too-annoying freshman completely set on studying Computer Science. When I attended the first lecture of Harvard’s world-famous Computer Science 50: “Introduction to Computer Science,” I sat in the front row and even volunteered to answer a question. It was a simple prompt about binary notation, and I totally rocked it.
As the semester went on, I slowly began to develop less of a clue regarding what I was doing. Loading and reading files? Never heard of it. C++? What on earth is that? Why is compiling so...hard?
I struggled a lot in CS50, pulling all-nighters in Lamont Library only to end up with more lines of gibberish code than I had started with. The final project, though, gave me hope. I figured if I harnessed my creativity and focused on learning concepts I was excited about, I could make something really cool.
So I downloaded XCode, taught myself Objective-C, and watched YouTube tutorials on how to create an iOS app. Fifty hours later, “I’d Rap That”, a photo caption generator based on a library of over six hundred rap lyrics, was done and working smoothly.
When I checked my final grades, I was horrified at the result of my CS50 efforts: a C. Here I was, expecting to become a software engineer, with a C in the first college coding class I’d ever taken.
So, I said goodbye to the Computer Science department and waved hello to the world of Economics. I fit in better in economics classes, anyway. I used to be really into polo shirts.
Regardless of my major switch, I actually thought “I’d Rap That” was a good project. I sent an email to my professor, sticking up for myself and for my work. After much back-and-forth, my grade was changed. My GPA went up by 0.2.
Later, when I launched “I’d Rap That” onto the iOS App Store, it received two thousand downloads within the first month. It also, for some reason, became quite popular in China. It was a good project, and I wondered why my professor hadn’t seen that.
The summer after my freshman year, randomly and with no prompt, I suddenly knew I had to go back to how much do computer engineers make.
As the semester went on, I slowly began to develop less of a clue regarding what I was doing. Loading and reading files? Never heard of it. C++? What on earth is that? Why is compiling so...hard?
I struggled a lot in CS50, pulling all-nighters in Lamont Library only to end up with more lines of gibberish code than I had started with. The final project, though, gave me hope. I figured if I harnessed my creativity and focused on learning concepts I was excited about, I could make something really cool.
So I downloaded XCode, taught myself Objective-C, and watched YouTube tutorials on how to create an iOS app. Fifty hours later, “I’d Rap That”, a photo caption generator based on a library of over six hundred rap lyrics, was done and working smoothly.
When I checked my final grades, I was horrified at the result of my CS50 efforts: a C. Here I was, expecting to become a software engineer, with a C in the first college coding class I’d ever taken.
So, I said goodbye to the Computer Science department and waved hello to the world of Economics. I fit in better in economics classes, anyway. I used to be really into polo shirts.
Regardless of my major switch, I actually thought “I’d Rap That” was a good project. I sent an email to my professor, sticking up for myself and for my work. After much back-and-forth, my grade was changed. My GPA went up by 0.2.
Later, when I launched “I’d Rap That” onto the iOS App Store, it received two thousand downloads within the first month. It also, for some reason, became quite popular in China. It was a good project, and I wondered why my professor hadn’t seen that.
The summer after my freshman year, randomly and with no prompt, I suddenly knew I had to go back to how much do computer engineers make.
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