9 months later
I often like to joke about how I failed grade 10 science and then went on to major in physics at university. It’s unfortunately a joke I can’t make so eloquently seeing as I’ve since dropped out of physics entirely to embrace the world of computer science but the point still holds some value. The value being that grades really don’t mean anything and you can really do anything if you really want to.
In grade 12, after a poor grade 11 year, I spent a large amount of my time and a obscene amount of effort to getting better grades. I was largely sucessful in that regard and I got into the University of Toronto to study physics. In hindsight I really only did this to prove to myself I’m smart. I don’t think I every really liked physics that much, just my physics teacher in highschool, who largely inspired me to get my act together but I went on to study it for at least my first year. It’s not like I did particularly bad in it, it’s just that I didn’t really care. It takes a special kind of person, a kind of person I have infinite respect for, to be able to dedicate their lives to physics, unfortunately I’m not that kind of person.
I like to be able to do things that have real effects right now. Not nescessarily on a grand scheme, but something I can show off my efforts for. I enjoyed things like wood working because after it’s all said and done I have something tangable, even if no one cares but me and that’s how computer science changed my life. It allowed me to take my skills and apply them in a way that had real, tangible results. It allowed me to unlock the power of my computer, phone or any techology really in a way I just haden’t before.
It all started 9 months ago. I was broke and still had a month left until school started again. I had taken some python programming classes, mostly because my friend was taking it and he wanted a partner. I had really been into Diablo 3 that summer and the newest expansion pack had just been announced and was to include a new leveling system, including account wide levels. So I was curious as to what level I would be when the game came out, so I wrote a python programming to calculate it for me.
Problem was I wanted a GUI, which while doable in python, I was unaware of that fact at the time. So I taught myself javascript and made this in HTML, but now I wanted to pull the data from the server so it would fill out my account’s information for me, so I learned PHP. (Admitedly I could of just done this in javascript but I wouldn’t learn this for a while later) I went on to learn, most notably C#, and plenty of other languages before school started. I was hooked. I switched my degree to a double major in computer science and physics only later to drop the physics all together to fully embrace computer science. But there’s just so much more too it than that.
I feel like I finally found my home. Now I have some really great friends in physics of whom I’ve had some fantastic times with but something was different about the people in computer science. I didn’t just get on with some of them, I got on with basically all of them. I felt, even from the get go when I really didn’t know anything, like this is where I belonged my entire life. I decided to get more involved in the department and I decided to get involved with this event known as UofTHacks.
I don’t really know why I decided to do this, but while volunteering at UofTHacks I stayed up for easily 40 hours straight. Either way I got to know a lot of people really quick. I then learned to android develop in class, which moved me onto iOS development. I’m now fluent in C, I dabble in C++/Objective C and am obsessed with hardware and HDL’s like verilog.
Computer Science has done so many great things for me beyond just being something that I truly find myself passionate about. I’ve met so many great people, made so many great friends and managed to become the president of the Computer Science Student Union here at UofT. I ran for president almost as my way to say thank you for everything UofT CS and the people in have done for me, whether or not they realize it or not. I’m a much happier person than I was 5 years ago when I failed grade 10 science; all because 9 months ago I got bored and started dabbling in computer science.
