Fortunate

Tess Rinearson
Tales from the Front
1 min readDec 5, 2012

I feel blessed that I am in a discipline where people pick each other up, rather than drag each other down.

In some majors, people tear pages out of textbooks and lie to one another and claw each other to the ground. This is all in the name of the “curve.”

In computer science, we still have a curve. But for some reason, nobody tears pages out of textbooks. Instead, people say things like, “If you’re still having trouble on Part 5, I can try to help you.” Instead, people say things like, “It’s 1 AM, but I’ll be up for another three hours. Feel free to message me whenever you want if you have any questions.”

One of my TA’s spent 8 hours, on a Friday night, with a group of students trying frantically to finish their homework. At about 10 PM, the room started to smell like computer scientist. In order to encourage our TA to stay, we ordered a pizza.

Then the room smelled like computer scientist and garlic.

That TA is a saint, but there are many saints in computer science. Some of them are my TA’s, and some are my classmates.

Computer science is hard enough already. We’re here for one another.

I think I am fortunate.

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Tess Rinearson
Tales from the Front

VP of Engineering, Tendermint Core. (Previously: @Chain, @Medium.)