First Code

I remember writing my first few codes. They were nothing big, just a few lines of extremely simple code. No complications whatsoever.

I had a hell-ish time though. I had no idea what i was doing, didn't understand what the professor was saying, didn't understand what the textbook was saying, and basically had no fuckin idea what i was doing. It took me a long time to figure out how an 'if - else' statement worked, or how a 'for' loop worked, or even how declaring variables needed a type and how the types varied. These were all extremely simple concepts, which in hindsight i should have gotten in the first few attempts, but i labored over them for many many hours. There were times where i was on the verge of tears, as a friend explained to me for the (literally) 10th time how a loop worked.

I stuck to it. With kind words from friends who had more experience, and from my dad, ( things like "We all had problems when we first started, just try hard and it'll eventually all fall into place" ), i eventually got the hang of it. I began to write my own code. Damn right. Not code i'd copied from someone, not code where i'd looked into someone elses laptop for a hint, but code i'd thought of on my own. And that was beautiful. It all fell into place miraculously. It all made sense!

And thus the love saga started. 

Pullu

One of our best friends (here onwards known as Pullu), is a fucking genius.

No really, he is.

Hes sorta scary too. He can get you killed (inside joke, nvm).

In the aforementioned CS 225 class (which we're taking next semester, and are terrified of), there are about 10 Freshmen in a class of over 150 kids, the rest being Sophomores or Juniors. In this class, Pullu got like a 94 in his first midterm, and thats one of the 5 highest scores in the entire class. Hes a fucking freshmen!

To our benefit though, we've been lucky enough for him to have a liking towards us, and he agreed to room with us next year.

Oh, he's also got a research project with one of the professors. No more details about that though, cause hes been made to sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement. All i can say is that its super-interesting, super-revolutionary, and they gotten massive funding for it.

On top of that, he did so well in last semester's CS course that the professor asked him to hold office hours this semester, so that students taking it this semester could ask him for help.

Yeah. So.. yeah.

Semester 2

This semester looks to be flying by. Spring break is just around the corner and it marks the halfway point of the semester. It promises to be an interesting break. We're all going to Chicago for a couple of days, my first visit to the Windy City.
The Q6 fiasco is pretty sorted out now. That was quite a scare.
Other than that, this semester just keeps getting better and better. =) 

Just for the record, i find Computer Architecture mind-numbingly boring.

Lets hope it gets interesting. 

Are you really scared of THAT?

So we have a friend who just happens to be a really smart, hardworking junior. I was sitting with him one day talking about the courses i want to take next semester.

"I don't know if i want to take CS 225 (Data Structures) and STAT 400 in the same semester. They both seem like really hard classes, especially CS 225. I don't know if i want to risk it", I said.

He scoffed, and gave me a dirty look.

"Are you really scared of THAT?", he glared at me. "Do you have any idea what i took in my sophomore year? I had two 300-level ECE courses, CS 225 and STAT 400 all in the same semester, and you're cribbing about taking CS 225 and STAT 400 together? Learn to work hard, cause you clearly don't know what that is now. I'd lose all respect for you if you chicken out of those two courses. Just do it", he advised with all the wisdom the last 3 years had given him.

At that moment i felt like an idiot. An idiot for feeling scared, an idiot for thinking i couldn't manage it, an idiot for voicing my fears. I vowed to take them together, regardless of how fucked i'd eventually get.

Introduction

Like in all good college classes, the first post on this blog is going to be an introduction.

Lank and I are both freshmen studying Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, which just happens to be one of the best places in the world to do Computer Science, with phenomenal research going on every minute of the day, with some of the best professors in the world, with a super computer on campus, and some of the brightest kids in the US.

How did we get in? We ask ourselves that very question every day.

We're both relatively bright kids, and have gone to some excellent schools in Hyderabad. We can do an incredibly high level of Math and Physics (we're both in sophomore level Math courses right now, and are certain to get A's), but have never done programming before. Why Computer Science then? Cause we love Math, we love making algorithms, we love debugging algorithms, and to a large extent thats basically what Computer Science is. Are we any good at it? Probably not.

After spending 8 hours doing our CS 231 (Computer Architecture 1) homework today, we came back home exhausted, and thought it would be interesting to chronicle the lives of two freshmen at an amazing university, neither of whom know anything about anything. We're surrounded by brilliant people, people who are already doing research as freshmen, people who wake up half an hour before an exam and do better than us, people who have been coding since the age of 7, people who we look up to.

This blog is partly an ode to the people around us who intimidate us, scare us and amaze us. But its mostly about how we flail our arms wildly over the next couple of years, trying desperately not to drown.