Page 145 - Your Guide to University Life

secret. I was in a bad situation, wanting to do computer science which I believed was my life calling and having to do architecture, for six years, six!
Then came the long holiday at the end of first year. I’m not sure whether it’s because I gave the issue deep thought or it just dawned on me like darkness giving way to daylight. My stance was now updated to ‘I could do architecture and computer science still’. Somehow, I decided (or realized) that it wasn’t that architecture wasn’t for me. Maybe it was that it had been and still was part of what I wanted to do in life and besides that, I could also accommodate my new passion of computer science. To cut the long story short, I decided that actually it was good I had been compelled into architecture school. I could do it pretty well. And I needed to go to architecture school and not computer science school because one needed to have attended architecture school to practise as an architect but one didn’t need to attend computer science school to practise as a computer scientist. One can learn computer science on their own, for free, using the many free resources on the web. And what’s more, maybe self-taught computer scientists are actually better than those who study it at formal institutions. I had found my balance. Ultimately, I decided, I’d graduate from campus with architecture papers but also as a self-taught computer scientist. Everything had fallen into place. All was good: all had been good all along. Now I believed I had finally discovered myself. That’s the end of my story.
I will not try to derive lessons from this story for you, even if it is mine from my own life. That’s because I think you are in a better position to do that, especially seeing that there are
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