
Ask HN: How do I deal with feeling discouraged about starting late? - poiuytrewq1
I&#x27;m 22 and have just switched from a mechanical engineering to CS to pursue AI research. I didn&#x27;t begin to learn programming until now and didn&#x27;t have an interest in STEM related fields until I got to college.<p>In all of my classes there are so many young (i.e 16-18 year olds), talented CS majors who are all interested in AI and have been programming and doing competitions since they were much younger, some even publishing papers on ML.<p>I feel so discouraged. And I know it&#x27;s irrational but I can&#x27;t help but feel so inadequate and awful. I would love to pursue research at places like DeepMind or OpenAI or Google etc (even saying that feels stupid when I look at the people in my CS department) and I keep telling myself that someone else&#x27;s successes in life don&#x27;t determine my trajectory or prevent me from achieving my goals, but it still stings realizing that they have years more experience than I do and are 3-5 years younger.<p>I&#x27;m just wondering if anyone else has experienced something similar and have any suggestions for how they dealt with it?
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FroshKiller
Experience evens out over the long term, and nobody knows everything. Try to
stop thinking in terms of competition, and focus on developing a specialty.
Take something your peers aren't familiar with and learn it inside and out.
Exchange that knowledge with them. Whenever you feel inadequate, acknowledge
the feeling then consciously reframe the moment as an opportunity to
collaborate--make your goal to either learn something from the person
"outclassing" you or to teach that person something. In my experience, people
we consider experts are so specialized that it makes them blind to fundamental
things that less experienced people catch.

