Aw, it’s nice to meet you! Thanks for the response.

Like I said, the essence of programming is taking a big, complicated problem, and making it into many smaller and simpler problems — but I think this is something you can apply throughout life.

Your own suggestion is great: think small first. It’s very difficult to think “I will become a really great Swift programmer”, but it’s easier to think “I can build a really basic To Do List app”. Then you can try to build more complicated apps, a step at a time. That’s how we run our courses, and it works for most of our students.

I don’t think you’re throwing away your Chemical Engineering Degree; engineering in general teaches you these types of problem solving skills. You definitely have a great advantage by having to solve difficult equations and things.

You’ll never get away from the fear of failure, so don’t worry about that. Fear of failure keeps you sharp and humble. Just don’t let it ruin your life. I try to deal with fear of failure by putting myself in situations where I feel true failure is impossible, by trying to keep the failures small, and doing my best to learn from the failure itself. If you approach each failure as a learning opportunity, it’s almost impossible to really fail. If you make the same mistakes over and over, however, I think it’s safe to call that true failure.

Lastly, I can’t help but make a small advertisement — we’re hosting a big Demo Day event on May 5th: https://www.facebook.com/events/119673051768058/. We’d love to have you — and you can see a few students really risk failure by presenting their class projects to many people! Hopefully their effort will inspire you.