CS Homework: Glorified Google Searches
LMGTFY. In a world full of hyper-specific acronyms, this one ranks high on my list of favorites. Let Me Google That For You is a website whose stated mission is “for all those people who find it more convenient to bother you with their question rather than search it for themselves.” By creating a demonstration of how to conduct a user-specified Google search, the website allows me to sarcastically alert people who ask for help that they could easily search for the desired information themselves.
Previously, I have begun to break into and dissect the coding world through the lens of a humanities major — which no easy feat, mind you. In a college setting, there is typically a huge division between STEM and non-STEM majors, considered to be separate entities as right-brain and left-brain thinkers. This phenomenon will resonate with any member of a university-related Facebook page, and is especially apparent in my favorite group titled “Cornell: Any Person, Any Meme.”
Before applying to TAVtech, I have typically been on the receiving end of jokes about how humanities are ‘easier’ than the hard sciences. My high school physics teacher believes this to be “[the] most toxic and limiting nomenclature that has been adopted by educators.” And while I have a profound appreciation for their contributions to our world stage, I find this gentle roasting to be unfairly one-sided and demeaning.
Because of this high barrier to entry, rarely does one see a liberal arts major taking C.S. classes to broaden their horizon and learn something new. On the contrary, many college students are pigeonholed into taking courses exclusively for their majors, electing to fulfill difficult requirements with classes known for being science-lite.
For these reasons, I applied to TAVtech in order to try computer programming in a safe space. *hold the Generation Snowflake jokes please, dad* The 5-week coding fellowship based in Tel Aviv, Israel offers 5 tracks including: Intro to Data Science, Web Development, Artificial Intelligence, Cyber Security, and Big Data. As a student in the first course, the #1 lesson that I have learned is that coding, at its entry-level, is accessible to students of all backgrounds.
Instead of dismissing programming as mystifying nerd jargon, I diligently apply myself to this discipline and learn. Most surprisingly, I have found that programmers rely heavily on Google to solve errors in code, application installations, and multiple other issues that arise over tens of lines of code.
So the next time someone asks me to explain a concept in Python, either at the beginner or expert level, I will kindly direct them to my handy LMGTFY website. Whether it’s sarcastic or not, however, will be hard to tell 😜
