In every single thing you do, you are choosing a direction. Your life is a product of your choices.
~ Dr. Kathleen Hall
And making those choices becomes a lot tougher as we grow with time. Especially in the present ocean of information we face as students. The choice paradox, we all face it, now more than ever. And its most prevalent for beginners.
In the past year since I joined college, I have constantly bump lanes with this feeling of not knowing what to choose, or in some cases choosing too much. So I thought it might be interesting to share those thoughts here.
Where it all mostly STARTS for everyone.
So I got into college with my chosen degree and some knowledge about computer science, along with a lot of inspiration from different articles and YouTube videos . But still nothing got me more overwhelmed than walking into a campus with thousands of students and with 600+ alone in my batch. I know, that is a crazy number. Listening to the orientation speeches especially added to it, they talked about all kinds of things from tech and what was expected of us. The room was filled with a lot of motivation, the waves of which carried away the people who were paying attention, and I happened to be one of those people.
That motivation drove me enough to take up Game development, Machine Learning and Competitive Programming all at once during the first few weeks of college, which is well and good as the first semester is mostly considered to be a time to be exploring different aspects of the industry. And honestly i was managing my time well enough juggling all the different things I was doing.
The TOO Motivated phase and the Breakdown.
Too much of anything is bad, but too much of Champagne is just right.
~ F.Scott.Fitzgerald
I don't know if i am at the age to drink Champagne yet but whatever. As I was going along with ' Improving my skills ' as you might call it, the feeling of not having enough time surely and inevitably struck me. But I ended up doing a really bad job in understanding that feeling. I decided to make up more time by sacrificing the time I gave to GAMES and ANIME ( deleting them from my PC ) that I loved so much just for the sake of being able to do more stuff instead of doing less stuff.
See where I got wrong there? Still, I was proud of that decision I made in the moment. I felt like I was surely on the path to become a great developer who doesn't waver in the face of distractions.
In about less than 2 weeks, I started to admit that I hated myself for doing that. The robot persona had finally been shaved off and it faced an intense breakdown now. I finally realized that it was immature of me for not being able to commit to one thing, I had way too much on my plate and there were no stress relievers on it. Compromising my happiness, my ANIME especially, was not something that was worth it. I realized the importance of balance between my choices.
CHOICES
Am I using this word too much?
Anyway, the only thing that my priorities chose at the time was getting a high paying job to pay off my debt in student loan faster. While I was and am still passionate about everyday technology and innovations, I felt like I was treating it like something I had to do, rather than something I wanted to do.
I would like to shamelessly blame the infinite amount of choices that were handed to me
and any other student who has faced this.
But it is also true that the more we face the ever growing database of choices and learn from them, the less likely we are to try to over fit our model of living/learning with the different features in it. And so improves the quality of our models performance.
Ok that Machine Learning pun was really very bad, but the point I am trying to make is, do not get lost. It is important to have a good grasp on all the different updates that keep coming up, it is easy to drown into the different click baits, but remember to step back and chill a little. That keeps you in good health.
I am trying to commit to ML for now and learning game dev on the side for when I get sick of databases. But I know that it might change and that's ok.
Signing off, keep grinding and chilling.