poke. poke.
"what cs classes are you taking this semester?" that inevitable question looms over the beginning of the school year like a time bomb just waiting to be set off, so i let the countdown play out with a sheepish grin before answering.
"none. lol"
i'm a cs major who has promptly decided to fade all my cs classes this semester. goodbye [ee]cs 1xx. har har har. my choice feels analogous to a bird who has decided to stop flapping its wings, squeaking and squawking "no more flying! no more flying," while the rest of its flock eyes it with morbid curiosity.
i am a senior now, a grateful senior living off of the pain, blood, sweat, and tears i've invested into my degree all these semesters, as i'm sure many fourth-years around me feel too. i'm what they consider old in the undergrad population. my roomie's little brother jokingly calls me a flavor of "unc." "i'm just two years older!" i plead to the physics boys upstairs, whom i enjoy econ history lecture with every tuesday and thursday. "am i really that old in their eyes?"
i've technically finished my minimum number of technical requirements last semester. yet at berkeley, there's always more to learn, always more to absorb and ingest. i have touched but a fraction of what my home department has to offer, and dropping one, let alone ALL, of my [ee]cs classes this semester feels so wrong. so irresponsible. so ungrateful.
…guilty.
…………guilty
………………guilty
gods, why is it so, so hard to press a silly little unenroll button? those courses that my classmates and i take are rich with gold but also tainted, semester-after-semester, with a river of our blood, sweat, and tears. our pool of collective pain, which once flowed freely through soda hall, now congregates at the bottom of hearst hill, where we reside in a crowded hole on the first and basement floors of the new computing college like a pit of zoo animals.
all hail the recently-opened "gateway building," with its pretty swirly stairs and fancy lecture halls that stay so glamorously gatekept from us! the hottest new college of computing deserves an equally fancy schmancy building for its cutting-edge work! perhaps i am snobby and ungrateful, but i know that my friends and i are not the priority. during the second day of class, i kneel outside the door while lecture occurs just 10 feet away from me…
| …behind closed doors. |
there isn't enough space for all of us to sit inside. the slides don't display correctly on the zoom broadcast we've been forced to watch, and the other students around me who have also been kicked out of class shuffle around in discomfort. we are all simply fire hazards. one undergrad looks hungrily at the lecture hall, calculating the shortest path they can exploit to weasel their way in. they are unlucky, for there is no cheap algorithmic solution. my neighbor takes out their phone and begins scrolling instagram reels.
at least the audio of the lecture is clear, i think to myself.
"you are competing against the 9-9-6's of the world," our professor says, rattling off to the in-person students as we strain to understand our computer audio. "do you want to just be called 'american smart?' or actual smart? that is our reputation. we expect you to grind."
grind? its not my brain that's grinding, but my soul that's grinding to bits as i open the freakishly long weeder homework and muster a mental barricade to maintain my sanity. i'm an old timer now! i dismiss my rising apprehension. it's nothing new; in fact, this is how things have always been, and always will be. (that's a shirley jackson the lottery reference, by the way.)
besides, there's nothing terrible to feel if i don't feel anything at all! i block the feelings of anger and dread and misery. i block out any big feelings. i block out them all. // I SAID BLOCK THEM ALL.
my mental barricade grows weaker and weaker every semester as my patience with these intentionally impossible-to-finish p-sets wears thin, but i try to hide it with an exasperated grin. sometimes, it feels like my mind is made of soft wool.
it's too crowded down here on floor one of the gateway building. all of a sudden, that fact feels abundantly clear. i strategically beg for upper-floor access and am one of the few privileged second-class citizens to be granted keycard permissions to first-class quarters. i don't even work with the other birds anymore. the flock is still down there, in what one of my best friends calls "the gladiator pit," while i sit and watch in silence from above. does that mean i'm a god?
i am exhausted after lecture is over. why do i do this to myself? i wonder. i'm as dumbfounded as the guy next door. why do i do nothing except reach for more sweat, blood, and tears. why? whywhywhywhywhy?
it's good for me! the voice in my head pleads. i'm in some masochistic, self-fulfilling prophecy where pain equals pleasure. i will be a "real ml person" if i take one more class. and one more, and one more and onemore and onemoreonemore…
the thought scares me. i feel as if i'm participating in one of those fervent sacrificial rites you only see in the movies, where indiana jones sweeps in and saves the day, except that there is no indiana jones here. i look down at the swirly stairs of the new gateway building, where only a few days ago, my friends and i analyzed the distance between the bars that bordered the steps and the yawning hole below. someone could accidentally drop a water bottle on some poor undergrad's head, i remark. i bet the architects didn't think of that as a design constraint.
"if we sit down there in the gladiator pit, we have to sit in the middle tables so that we don't die from falling objects," my friends strategize. the stair bars look more like metal jail bars now.
i wonder if i'm in a privileged prison. i need to get out.
how many people did i have to talk to before i could convince myself to DROP THE DAMN CS CLASSES? six. six and counting. i cling to these courses like a drowning child clinging to a lifeline.
"the first homework is to keep the serious students," my professor says. i squirm under that sentence and log out of calcentral, abandoning the "drop classes" page. i am one of those serious students, i plead. please, see me. believe me. but i don't even want to start the homework. i open the pdf and feel the urge to throw up, because i can't go through this again. i already did. please, i already did. i already did this six-times-over during the last three years. are you going to make me do it again? i don't even know who i'm begging.
"just drop them if they're causing you so much internal pain," my friends tell me. but i know that it is me alone who will walk this road less traveled by. i drop the lower-stakes cs class first and linger on the second course. why do i hesitate? what do i have to prove? who do i need to prove myself to? haven't i proven my own capabilities enough? i am disgusted by my own thoughts. i am cringing at the full class list, the full waitlist, the people on edstem who are begging to get into this esteemed course while i'm dropping it as easily as a sack of rice onto the kitchen floor. what do i lose from this? i suppose i won't be the machine learning powerhouse i promised myself i'd be. my right wrist aches, still not yet recovered from a six-week wrist sprain. i'd punched an arcade bag too hard to prove to the men i was with that i was as strong as they were. i weight train! i had tried projecting telepathically to them. i weight train! don't you see it? i'm just as strong as you!
i wasn't even close in score on that stupid arcade punching game. and i was the only one who walked out with a sprained wrist.
idealistic idiot.
my thoughts draw back to my impending decision. when i graduate next semester, i am likely never going to have the chance to take this cs class again. i have the luxury of choice and opportunity, yet i always find a way to rant about that privilege and turn it into something dark.
ungrateful, wasteful, can only do hard math problems with chatgpt, personality hire??!
suck it up. suck it up suck it up suck it up, i grumble.
i click the unenroll button.
cleansing relief floods through my veins--one that i have not felt in a long, long while.
mental pain has become my reward signal, even as i balk at it. i reach for validation even as my gut reels in repulsion, because i view these things as "good for me." what the "real smart kids do." i think that the hard tech classes are the juicy mangoes, the ones that i have to reach for high up in the branches to show my worth and my grit and my persistence.
in reality, they are just low-hanging fruit.
my friend calls me and asks about one of the hyperparameter tuning problems in homework 1. "could you get yours to work?" he asks. i grin sheepishly. "i'm so sorry my guy. i would help you, but i'm not in this class anymore so i have no idea."
"oh no, what happened?"
"you'll think i'm crazy, but i dropped all of my cs classes lmao. all of them."
silence. i tense at the momentary pause.
"damn, that's fucking goated," he says. "i respect that so much."
i have good friends.
i walk into advanced fiction in wheeler hall on wednesday with a pen and paper in hand, my computer tucked safely away from sight. this 15-person workshop is what i consider my baby miracle. i applied to five versions of this course across three semesters, praying for a seat in any one of five different instructors' offerings, each application consisting of 15-page writing samples that i poured my heart and soul into.
i got rejected from all of them. until i made it into this one.
the professor, who authored two books prior to this, used to be an editor for the new york times, i read in her bio. they say you only need one yes amidst the infinite no's. i have never been so giddy.
"write an intro about yourself to your fellow writers, in the third person," she greets us warmly on the first day of class. "it can be creative. anything. whatever your heart desires."
there are only 15 of us around the table. the media kids and english kids and complit kids who dress artsy and speak eloquently weave their intros like an intricate storybook.
"joey was born, on a starless night, in delivery room no. 3 one lonely wednesday to a mum and dad who were as new to this country as he was. 3 was the room he was born in, the month he celebrated his birthday every year, the number of people he had loved and lost in the past, the number he considers lucky because it is the same number as this beautiful planet we call home, only three away from the stars. he sometimes wonders if all of this is a sign of something grand, or if it's a load of rubbish he has derived from years of meaningless coincidences."
"elise, master of terrible puns and odd outfit combinations, considers herself a connoisseur of first-person narrative fiction, though she dabbles in poetry and long-form writing too. she takes inspiration from maya angelou and bakes a mighty meat pie, though a consequence of this occupation is that she occasionally considers herself a fire hazard."
we are made to read each other's intros, and i am glad that mine was read first and not last. it would have been an embarrassment had it been the reverse order, for it would be analogous to taste-testing cafeteria pizza after eating a gordan ramsey five-course meal.
"carolyn is a senior studying (cue the degree pleasantries). she is interested in (cue the academic pleasantries) and enjoys writing (cue the genre pleasantries)."
as the bio readings snake around the circle, each voiced by the person next to the original writer, i'm already internally rattling off the cosine similarity between my intro and a CLAUDE.MD file. yikes. the only saving grace i have from a blatant match is the last sentence i wrote. the student who read my bio aloud said she liked that sentence the best. probably because it housed my singular drop of personality. i wonder where the rest of my creativity went.
"carolyn is glad that this class is going analog," my neighbor reads, holding up my messy cursive. "she really needs to get away from her stinky computer."
my professor laughs, and i let out a sigh of relief.
i still have a lot to learn.