so i’m sitting here watching my suitemates play Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare 2. this game is great. it’s changed my life quite a bit. ever since it came out, i … i’m just kidding. but this game is serious fun.
i’m 21 years old now. everyone thinks of it as joining the drinking club, but i think it’s more than that. at the risk of sounding pretentious, i think of turning 21 as joining society for real. in all aspects of my life, i’m picking up responsibility and i’m okay with that. i’m growing more confident in my abilities and realizing where i fit into the big jigsaw puzzle of life. in my last post, i talked about goals, ones which i still aim for. however, in this post, i’ll elaborate on the one about not failing college.
i always say things like “i’m a bad student” or “i just don’t like studying.” to an extent, it is true – i’m more of a learn by action rather than reading. recently, i just find myself turned off from computer science more and more. it’s getting harder and i know i’m not putting forth the effort to learn it. i took a silly online myers-briggs personality indicator test and it told me i’m a very organized semi-leader. i thought about this result and realized it’s pretty accurate. i thought about how i chose to stick to majoring in computer science rather than switch into Management of Information Systems (MIS). my brother essentially said “MIS is pussyshit” so i decided to tough it out. i followed my brother into computer science because we both grew up playing with computers, but now i’m starting to see the difference between us. he’s just better at math than i am and compsci fits him more. i can do a good amount of programming, but it’s just not my true strength. i’m not meant to be a straight-up engineer. i should choose something more suitable to my personality so i should switch into MIS. i’m okay with being the compsci dropout. the problem of actually switching is that i only have 3 semesters at BU left. i’d be willing to stay an extra semester if required though. i’m sure i’m not the only one that has had a late revelation like this. this situation will work itself out – my mom says i’m lucky, haha.
Well, there is always a lot of overlap, as that quote indicates. For example, if you are going into software engineering, you’ll almost certainly take a course in compiler design, which should have a decent amount of formal language theory in it. Every software engineer should know some complexity theory as well… at least enough to recognize when an algorithm is reasonably efficient, and when it isn’t. Most of the people I knew when I was in grad school for computer science were good programmers. But I do say *most*… some couldn’t really program much at all.