Pre-Med to Programmer: How Failure Helped Me Find My Passion
On August 16, 2014, I was one of forty developers to showcase their iPhone games at the MakeSchool Demo Day in New York City. Through hard work, numerous play-testing sessions with my peers, and the help of MakeSchool’s fantastic instructors, I was able to produce a working, fully illustrated game, Sleepy Head: Survive to Sunrise, in just under two months. I’m a post-baccalaureate computer science student, and I have been coding for just over a year. This is the story of how I went into computer science.
When I was in lower and middle school, I was a so-called problem student who struggled greatly with math and science. Out of the twenty-one kids in my fourth grade class, I was the last to master the multiplication tables. In sixth grade, I got a “C” on my first science lab practical, making the basic mistake of holding the bulb of a thermometer while trying to measure the room temperature. Back then, I did not care much about what I was learning, since grades didn’t matter until high school. This attitude stemmed in part from the tendency of Taiwanese families, including my own, to over-emphasize the importance of grades.
In Taiwan, many families encourage their children to strive for academic excellence and become either physicians, lawyers, or businesspeople. Because of this, I felt great shame whenever I received a bad grade on an exam or needed extra help on an assignment. In order to maintain an image of a “perfect” student, I got into the habit of sacrificing learning in favor of obtaining perfect grades. This fear of slipping academically unfortunately caused me to avoid subjects that seemed too rigorous or technically demanding. That was how I went through all of high school and college without taking a single computer science class.
In college, I entered a STEM field, behavioral biology, with the intention of pursuing a career in medicine. While I developed a genuine interest in my major, particularly in the subjects of animal behavior, neuroscience, and evolution, I could never muster much passion for premed. Everyone around me, including my roommates, mentors, and interviewers, could tell. There was this voice in my head that constantly told me that I did not belong in pre-medicine, but for the first two years of college, I suppressed this voice. I wanted my family to be proud of what I was doing, and becoming a doctor would allow me to repay them for all their help and support.
Little by little, the path before me started to crumble. Each time I failed an interview for a medically-related position, did poorly on a test, or messed up the slightest step in a surgery (on rats), a wave of despair and hopelessness washed over me. With each and every successive failure, that doubting voice in my head grew louder and louder. Soon, I was convinced that I was not fit to be a physician and kept finding reasons to quit.
One of my best friends and roommate finally convinced me to step off the pre-medical path. A dedicated pre-medical (now medical) student, she relentlessly pursued opportunities in her field, and did not allow herself to be dragged down by mistakes and rejections. When I saw the difference between us, I knew for sure that I did not want to become a physician. While I was fazed by the slightest setback, she kept trying and trying to achieve her dream, a sign of true passion.
Junior year of college, I successfully convinced my family to allow me to pursue a field of my own choosing. Telling my family that I was giving up on becoming a physician was one of the most painful decisions I’ve had to make. But I had to do it for my sake, their sake, and the sake of the medical community. There were already too many uncaring physicians out there, pursuing medicine only for the sky-high salary, prestige, or because their family expected them to. I was not going to join their ranks.
I spent the rest of my undergraduate years dabbling in a variety of science-related fields, trying to find something that I both enjoyed and was reasonably good at. Unfortunately, my continued avoidance of engineering and computer science severely limited my options (originally, I actually wanted to be an engineer, but believed that it would be too challenging for me), and by the time of my graduation, I still had no idea what I was going to do with my life. That’s when my stepfather, an experienced, self-taught developer, urged me to try computer science.
Initially, I balked at my stepdad’s suggestion, for a couple of reasons. Computer science is widely regarded as a man’s profession in Taiwan, and even in the comparatively more liberal USA, men greatly outnumber women in the tech industry. Another, more concerning issue, was that I had literally zero experience with coding at the time, and feared that I would never catch up with people who started coding in college, high school, or way back in elementary school.
After much debating, I realized I did not have anything to lose. Even if CS turned out to be the wrong field to me, I would still walk away from my classes with a valuable skill. So over the summer, I took the GRE, applied to a couple of post-baccalaureate programs over the summer, and was fortunately accepted to my top-choice university.
My first CS class changed me in many ways. Unused to the format of the classes, assignments, and exams, I often had to ask professors, teaching assistants, and classmates, for help. Given my upbringing, this was very difficult for me to accept at first, but over time I gained enough knowledge and skills to help my peers with their computer science classes and projects in return. Eventually, I came to enjoy most aspects of programming, and started competing with myself to make faster, cleaner, and more aesthetically appealing programs. Even debugging was not so bad —
I kid, I still hate debugging.
Switching to CS gave me much more than a set of valuable, marketable skills. After I started coding, I began to appreciate the value of understanding and applying the material I learned in my classes. I became bolder and more confident, eagerly pursuing opportunities to work on apps that people would actually use in their daily lives. Failures didn’t faze me as much as they used to, probably because they happened so often — while I was learning C, for instance, I caused enough segmentation faults to cumulatively fill up a hundred consecutive terminal screens.
I would love to conclude by saying that CS wasn’t so hard after all, but that would be a lie. Even now, I still find CS to be very challenging. However, I also find it to be extremely rewarding and fun. When I shipped my first iPhone game, Sleepy Head: Survive to Sunrise, to the App Store in September 2014, I was overflowing with excitement. Within a year, I had gone from knowing nothing about CS to building and shipping my own game! A year ago, I wouldn’t have believed that this was possible.
While it’s true that I started coding a lot later than most of my peers, and that I still have a lot to learn about CS, I will not let my late start get in the way of my dreams. I finally found my passion, and I want to become a software developer.
Sleepy Head: Survive to Sunrise is now available on the App Store! https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/sleepy-head-survive-to-sunrise/id912242205?mt=8
