Mon Sep 25 11:45:26 PST first day: Well, I missed the campus tour I was going to go on -- the bus took a lot longer than expected. No big deal... I can go tomorrow, or if it doesn't work out, that's fine.
I have been thinking a lot about school, obviously, and my reasons for going, how likely I am to find success (or enjoyment) in it, what it will mean for the future, and also what my greatest obstacles will be.
First of all, I hope that I haven't taken too many classes at once.
Anyway, the biggest reason I am here is to "fill in the gaps" of knowledge I have because I never formally studied CS, and even in my work/projects I have usually taken an OSPF (Open Shortest Path First... nerd joke) towards completing that activity, rather than actually learning the "right way" to do it. And that brings me to my first self-realization: I'm really good at getting something done, but not necessarily good at learning all the details along the way.
And that ties into another thought -- I am very good at memorizing trivia and factoids -- I do it almost effortlessly. I can read an article about some piece of history or some Andean Butterfly and tell you all about it -- But if I am trying to memorize, let's say, fundamental properties of Boolean algebra, it suddenly becomes very difficult for me, and I don't know why. Specifically, I think I have difficult translating symbolic representations of abstract concepts into mental models that I completely understand. (Learing directly from a math textbook is very difficult for me.) Instead, I'm fairly good at recalling and synthesizing concrete bits of information. Unfortunately, math, logic, programming languages, interactions of command-line switches... are symbolic representations of abstract concepts. I'm not sure if it's an attention span problem or just one area that I'm not particularly "good" at.
And that ties into the next thought, which is that I am one of the kind of people who usually does well enough at things without having to try particularly hard (but not necessarily finding excellence at anything). As my piano teacher said, "Jack of all trades, master of none." I had friends who had to work hard for their grades -- and in the end, regardless of who may have had more or less raw talent -- the friends of mine who had to work hard generally had a better grasp and intuition than people like me who just floated through.
The consequence of this is that I am not very good at confronting a problem when it is truly difficult for me. I look for a way around it rather than a way through it... and in a subject like Computer Science especially, that is absolutely not the point, and thus I can't allow myself to just fall back into that mode of finding success, because it will not help me find the kind of understanding I am here for. I hope that I can find new mental models and ways of learning to leverage the talents I do have against my deficiencies.
Speaking of abstract concepts, it's time for Computation and Automata!
