“Computer Science is a tool.”
This was what my colleague (and friend) said in a car-ride back from lunch a few days ago, and it sparked something — because it reminded me of why I wanted to do CS in the first place.
Ironically, it was before I started studying CS that I thought about this the most — at the beginning, I was interested in Computer Science because I had wanted that capacity to create; coming from a more business-ish background in terms of the things I did and the roles I played, I’ve always felt a missing link in my ability to translate my ideas into reality because I didn’t possess the technical skills to actually implement my ideas.
It was that realization, then, that lead me toward a CS degree, and along the way, I’ve found snippets of insights from random conversations with people here and there that have only confirmed and reaffirmed my desire to pursue CS: as a means to an end.
And so, it was really a reminder of why I had wanted to do Computer Science in the first place, because what I’ve realized, also is that when you go very deep into the study of something there is that tendency to lose sight of the bigger picture — which makes sense, I guess, if you were to think about it literally; suppose you looked at a mountain from afar — it’s pretty easy to look at its majesty in the context of the surrounding countryside. But let’s say we really wanted to study this mountain, to understand this mountain — it’s constituents, it’s inhabitants, it’s nooks and cranny — we scale this mountain: suddenly, that broadness of perspective disappears, because we are on the mountain.
Now obviously this analogy isn’t 100% accurate, but from my experience at least, I’ve felt its veracity in the few occasions that I had the space to step back and look at the things I’ve done. In school, especially, with all the homeworks and projects and tests and homeworks that ceaselessly come, it becomes very easy to get lost in the morass of ‘things-I-need-to-do’ and lose sight of the reason I had wanted to do these things in the first place.
And so, it’s these occasional reminders, I guess, that keep me grounded, and that serve as really useful reminders of why I was doing what I was in the first place.
To that end, I personally feel that the Computer Science I learn in school is a beautiful complement to the programming I do outside of class, because these deeper Computer Science concepts inform some of the choices and decisions I make when I’m building a mobile app, let’s say, or designing an algorithm to effectively parse a list of JSON objects to for a username.
With what little I (in retrospect) knew of what I was getting into, there was a good chance things could have gone horribly wrong. But I’m glad it didn’t, and I’m honestly grateful that I can wake up each day looking forward to doing what I love.
fang.
