42 Piscine Day 13 — (Rush01)

Edit: This is part of a series that culminated here, Next post. Previous post.

Edit2: I consolidated all the posts of the piscine daily posts here

Edit3: You can read up about what it’s like as a cadet at 42 here

It’s the weekend which means two projects; a group project and a personal one. The personal one is worth more points, but the group one feels more important to me as it demonstrates teamwork and collaboration etc. How these are actually weighted is unknown to me, but there has been some debate among the students where the time would be better spent.

My group for the group project is not ideal. One of my members is attending an entrepreneurship expo in San Fransisco for both days we are allowed to work on it. She is eager to work on it but absent, so she wanted to cram in as much as possible before she left and has asked me to stay late as well. So to accommodate and give her the chance I will be here till midnight. The other one I chatted with didn’t seem convinced that it was worth putting much time into, her friend sort of spoke for her and told me to not waste my time on it and focus on the personal project instead as it was worth more points. I told her I would check in with her once I’d done more, she hasn’t answered any further messages. So it seems like it’s just me working on this, and I’m stuck on something that should be simple, displaying a double array to the screen. If I can’t manage that at least then I’ll have to either find another way to store my data or actually give up. Perhaps by choosing to work on the group project I chose poorly again.

My friend’s group is very different than mine, two of her teammates are superstar programmers and she is the least capable (though still very capable). Which has a different feeling of wanting to not be the dead weight, instead of trying to convince people to show up like mine.

Yesterday I was chatting with another student here and he said something to the effect of “I haven’t failed a test since the third grade, this place makes me feel dumb” and that seems to sum up the gist of it. Most of us are the types who are usually the smartest person in the room, and here many of us are not, at least not compared to each other, the constant inability to do everything (often interpreted as failure) contributes to this feeling as well.

More people are struggling and at similar levels as myself than I thought, my worry is that this means I’m actually in worse shape than I thought. It still remains to be seen if they value people with previous programming experience over those who are first time learners, it would make sense as they would score higher, but that doesn’t seem to be the vibe that I’m getting. Ironically most of the people doing well this piscine are people who have taken one previously or have lot of background in coding. My one semester of C++ at community college helped me understand loops and that’s it, I didn’t really have an edge at all because of it. The stuff we are learning is so much deeper than anything I’ve learned about code before that anything short of a years worth of experience (or schooling in computer science) wouldn’t really prepare you much for it. Those who are doing well seem to have that year of experience.

I can see my writing get lower and lower quality everyday, it rambles more and drifts, I’m mentally tired when I get around to writing, I’m mentally tired everyday, most of us are. I have run into a few people though who are here but not really attending, or are only attending a couple of hours a day. I wonder what their motive was, just free rent for a month? That doesn’t seem like enough for me, but then again who knows.

I forgot to take a headcount today, but I’m sure more have quit.

The group project is to make a sudoku solver.