CRAZY TYPES OF HARVARD’S CS50 STUDENTS YOU DON’T WANT TO LOOK LIKE
There are characters who are a little bit crazy everywhere, and the online Harvard’s CS50 is not the exception. If you feel identified with any of them, don’t worry, the purpose of this blog, is to help you to find solutions to your programming challenges and to help you to complete CS50 Introduction to Computer Science.
1. THE ETERNAL WELL-MEANING BEGINNER
He has been enrolled in the course since the course first appeared on the Edx platform in 2012. He has very good intentions, but unfortunately, his multiple occupations, his multiple hobbies, his multiple social commitments, his work, the university, his emotional ups and downs, his poor time management, and anything else that happens in the world, prevent him from passing from week 0.
During the last years, he has started the course 8 times, because according to his philosophy, “it is always good to start again”.
Every time he starts the course in January, he abandons some other important project that he will never take up again or that he might take up again next year and he promises himself that this year he will finish the course.
His motivation lasts a week and then he forgets about the course until December 31 and the year ends, which is when he starts thinking about his purposes for the new year (one of which is obviously to finish the course).
He has a wonderful portfolio made up of eight Scratch projects in which a cat, a penguin, and a duck appear, chatting in different scenarios.
His latest Scratch project is the Star Wars version of the conversation between the cat, the penguin, and the duck.
If he reincarnates someday, he will probably start the course again.
2. THE ONE WHO THINKS HE’S ACTUALLY STUDYING AT HARVARD
He introduces himself on Linkedin and other social networks as a Harvard student despite living thousands of miles away from Cambridge Massachusetts and never having set foot in the United States.
If someone tells him otherwise, he bursts into a futuristic, altruistic, social democratic, surrealistic, utopian, and fantasy speech that ends up boring and convincing anyone who dares to contradict him that it is better to leave him alone in everything regarded to this issue.
He makes it clear in his Linkedin profile (in small print) that he is taking the online course and makes no mention whatsoever that he is stuck in Problem Set 1, Mario more.
He loves Harvard so much that on Sunday mornings he goes to the supermarket to buy milk sporting his grey Harvard hoodie that he bought on Amazon and he is convinced that the passers-by on the street look at him and think that he is somehow related to the prestigious university, despite living on the other side of the planet. His favorite movie is “The social network”.
Every week he does the experiment of emulating his heroes from the movie “The Social Network” and sits in front of the computer in shorts trying to complete the PSET1 equipped with a six-pack of beer and a bowl full of Cheetos, because he is convinced that that is the secret to being as cool and good programmer as the Harvard students, without realizing that maybe the problem is precisely drinking so many beers.
Usually when he goes on his fourth beer, he leaves the computer and goes to watch “A beautiful mind” and the next day he wakes up more crazy and goes to the supermarket in his sweatshirt with the logo of Princeton.
He’s visited the psychiatrist several times over the last few years and his girlfriend threatens to leave him every weekend, but he always manages to convince her that someday he’ll have a million-dollar idea that will make him a millionaire and somehow he always manages to get her back.
He’s totally harmless, the only problem is that he really thinks he’s a Harvard student.
3. THE PROFESSIONAL PROCRASTINATOR
He loves studying so much that he has been in college for over seven years and has yet to graduate.
He’s not a bad guy and he doesn’t lack motivation. He loves computer science and is a strong advocate of virtual education, to the point that he is enrolled in 82 courses related to programming on different platforms at the same time and has not managed to complete half of the curriculum in any of the courses.
He has a mentality similar to that of the eternal beginner, with the difference that the professional procrastinator manages to move slowly towards the goal and manages to finish the course one day.
It usually takes about three years for him to complete the course. His worst enemy is Facebook, Twitter, Tik-Tok, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Youtube.
He’s usually single, in his early 30s, lives in his parents’ basement, and is a member of more than 20 CS50-related Facebook groups and more than 10 developer communities.
He’s usually a hardcore loner and arrives home around 6 pm, and when he sits down in front of the computer with the firm intention of starting work on one of the PSETS, a friend from Western Mongolia or a friend from Finland or New Zealand, who he met in one of the CS50-related Facebook groups, writes to him to say hello.
He has a “stable” relationship with an Estonian CS50 student girl that he met online, even though she is married with two children in Estonia. Anyway … he chats with her until he loses track of time (what a surprise).
When he finishes answering messages, more than three and a half hours have passed and he decides to go to the supermarket to buy cigarettes and coke (he is convinced that drinking coffee, smoking, and drinking coke, for some reason helps him to be a better programmer).
He is a fan of starting on the hour. If it’s nine twenty-five at night he decides to start at ten o’clock and while it’s ten o’clock he just watch videos on youtube.
The most paradoxical thing is that the videos he watches on youtube are usually about how not to procrastinating and about how to stop wasting time.
When it is already midnight, armed and stimulated with his coffee, his coke, and his cigars he finally starts working on the solution of some problem, and in spite of being quite efficient between midnight and two in the morning, the time he spends on the course is not enough to advance quickly and the next day he starts the cycle again.
We wish him good luck and hope he doesn’t get cancer.
4. THE NARCISSISTIC PSYCHOPATH
This one really sucks and is not funny at all. He has a successful professional and academic record but it is rather dark due to his twisted mentality.
His favorite quote is “The end justifies the means.” He’s the typical pedant of the Facebook groups related to CS50, who usually enjoys rubbing other students’ faces in the genius of his solutions, the genius of his algorithms and the short time it took him to finish the course and how he managed to complete the CS50’s Introduction to Artificial Intelligence in a week (according to him).
He may be a software engineering graduate with serious self-esteem problems who had a hard time graduating and who works in some unknown software company and who bizarrely enjoys the suffering and hardship of others, or he may be the typical guy from another profession, with the soul of a bureaucrat or a lawyer, who gets the solutions to problems on the Internet, uploads the solutions without understanding what he is doing and the only thing that interests him is to see his name printed on a certificate to move up the career ladder that he entered with the help of an uncle or someone he knows.
His contributions in the forums and social networks are usually toxic and trying to make others look ridiculous.
He probably wasn’t breastfed in childhood.
5. THE SUFFERER
Usually a software engineer with a Master’s degree in computer science under the age of 26, who is trying to get a good job and just realized that the world is changing and that after spending thousands of dollars on his higher education, he didn’t learn any skills that would allow him to perform in the real software development industry.
He spends all day reading articles and blogs related to stories of self-taught programmers who got jobs at Google and Amazon and his big dream is to make it to Silicon Valley no matter what.
His main motivation is sacrifice and hard work but the bad thing is that he takes things too personally.
He spent his last savings paying for the CS50 verified certificate on Edx.
He never sleeps more than five hours a day and in a similar way to the professional procrastinator, he is enrolled in dozens of online courses related to computer science but the difference is that he is determined to complete them all and he already completed a lot of them.
He doesn’t sleep reading about the new technologies that appear every day, and the different professional branches of programming out there are driving him completely insane, so he is determined to study them all. Web Development, Deep Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Computer Vision, Machine Learning, etc. and the same thing happens to him with programming languages.
He spend too much time studying 365 days a year, that he always forgets to apply for jobs.
He gets quite frustrated when things don’t go well for him and the economic and academic revolution of our times has him quite bitter.
He doesn’t know whether to invest in a Ph.D. because he’s already quite indebted to the bank and this keeps him in a perpetual state of anarchic thinking and for that reason his dream is to start a crypto revolution or to start supporting some kind of international cypherpunk crypto-anarchist movement.
He will go far if he can find a way to channel his energies, but studying doesn’t have to be a punishment.
IN CONCLUSION
Good luck, future Software Engineer!!!
And remember Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.