

Ask HN: Halfway through school, realizing I don't enjoy software engineering - donduckdraper

I&#x27;m going to be entering my 3rd year of school this fall, one of top 4 CS programs (Stanford, Berkeley, MIT, CMU), and I&#x27;m currently doing an internship.<p>First of all, I really don&#x27;t think I&#x27;m good at programming. Like not good - I struggle with anything but the easiest interview-type questions, I&#x27;m not particularly good at school assignments without a partner, and now at my internship I feel even more inadequate.<p>I&#x27;ve bombed my Data Structures class and Algorithms class, not too well in AI, and okay in everything else.<p>There&#x27;s a good chance my &#x27;dislike for CS&#x27; is coming from my constant failure, but I don&#x27;t know what to do. What options do I have (both CS and non-CS, industry and academia)?<p>I&#x27;ve been doing some computational finance stuff on the side which has been interesting, and also will probably get a double degree in math by the end of my four years (which, I&#x27;ve also been rather mediocre in, grades-wise).
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brudgers
If you enjoy computational finance then it's not all doom and gloom. Finding
one's interests is what college is really for and if you didn't broaden your
intellectual horizons during that time, it would be unfortunate but not all
that uncommon.

Part of the difficulty of going to a top school for some people is that their
relative standing moves toward the middle because the group is so select. But
against an absolute standard, a double degree from a top university in math
and CS is pretty high achievement. Which is all a way of suggesting to keep
things in perspective and to move at your own beat toward your own goals.

Finally, CS is hard and any time you doubt it pick up Knuth Volume 4a and
realize he's been writing a book on compilers for over 50 years and he's one
of the smartest computer scientists we've come across so far. Peter Norvig
suggests learning a programming language takes ten years [0] and he was the
head of AI at NASA's Ames Research Labs and may have written your AI Textbook.

Good luck.

[0]: [http://www.norvig.com/21-days.html](http://www.norvig.com/21-days.html)

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partisan
Tough love follows.

Get your act together. Seriously. Life gets harder as you go along, not
easier. You have time now to find your passion. Find it quickly and get on
with it.

If you get yourself on track, I am sure you will easily find a job in the
financial sector so run with the computational finance stuff and you will be
pretty well rewarded.

