Senioritis

No, I'm not talking about your relationship status on Facebook with that weird girl from back home. You know-- the one you sort of dated for like a week, fell in love, she dated someone else, and you never got over it? I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about my latest computer science homework assignment.My programming assignments used to be easy to explain, even for some of the advanced classes. People would ask me what I was up to, and it would be easy enough to respond with something simple, like "I'm writing a program that solves Sudoku puzzles" or "I'm writing a program that kind of works like a chat room." These days, I often settle for "it's complicated" and leave it at that. This is due to no one understanding what I do anymore. There are only so many people who you can tell, "I'm re-coding DNS for my TCP/IP class," who won't give you a blank stare as if you have suddenly switched into some galactic moon-speak language.

By the way, if you understood any of what that meant and you're not a computer science major: I'm sorry. You probably need to get out more. For the rest of humanity: that's stuff that helps make the internet work.

Thankfully, I am not alone in this. Often I talk to engineers about their assignments and am similarly dumbfounded. This also happens with other science majors. Don't even get me started on the math majors. After a while, that stuff just doesn't seem real. In college, math seems to go from numbers and letters to letters to something that is a close relative of kanji.

The good news: when I'm talking to you about this, and you don't understand, that does not make you an idiot! You don't need to feel dumb. You understand more about soil, structures, steel or management than I ever would want to. You don't need to feel dumb, just different. Besides, who wants to know what those nerds in [insert whatever major here] know? I mean, that's just boring, right?

The bad news: if you don't know what the people in your own major are talking about, it's probably time for a change in major. That's a sign that you really might want to do something else with your life. Either that or you need to wake up in class.

A favorite quote of mine to show the amusement in all this is the third law of prediction by Arthur C. Clarke: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." You have your engineering magic that makes the world work. I have my computer science magic that makes all the software you run work. And the computer engineers know both. But who wants to know what those nerds in computer engineering know, anyway? It's complicated.

13 weeks left, my major can beat up your major any day.