September 2017

By Armind Chahal 

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            As I prepare to return to Ann Arbor for my second year at Michigan, I can’t help but to reflect on my freshman year. I think of the wonderful new friends I made while also growing closer to friends I came to Ann Arbor with. I think of the nights I’ve stayed up conversing with others and the nights spent finishing dreadful EECS 280 projects. A lot happened in those 8 short months, including deciding on my major: Computer Science. For the most part, I knew coming in that I wanted to do CS so I was prepared for the heavy workload and long nights. What I wasn’t prepared for, however, was the intimidation that comes with such a difficult major.

            I remember going to one of the first EECS 280 labs and realizing that there was material that I didn’t understand, but I didn’t raise my hand to ask a question. No one did. It seemed like everyone understood the material except me, even though looking back I know that wasn’t the case. I only went to one more lab session after this. I stopped going simply because I was afraid I would ask a dumb question. I was intimidated because I was one of the only girls in the room. I was intimidated because in high school, I was always one of the smartest kids in the room, but here I wasn’t.

            If I wasn’t going to ask questions in lab, my stubbornness was definitely going to get in the way of me going to office hours. Even though I had been told countless times to go to office hours, I still didn’t go because I genuinely believed that if I was meant to major in computer science, I would be able to figure everything out without extra help. Words cannot describe how much I suffered because of this. I found myself making silly mistakes in my code that an IA in office hours could easily fix. I wasted so much time trying to figure out things that were explained in labs because I thought that asking questions meant that I was not smart enough for computer science.

            I know for a fact that this year, I will most definitely go to lab and office hours. There’s no such thing as being too smart to go to office hours, and there is no such thing as a dumb question, as long as it is relevant. It’s easy to feel intimidated, especially early in the year, but it’s important to keep in mind that we are all here studying what interests us because we belong here.