Ell's Blog: 🎓 It's Been a Long Time Coming

On Monday, I submitted my bachelor’s thesis, and with it, a tremendeous weight lifted off my shoulders. I started the journey of studying computer science in late 2017. That’s eight years of a bachelor’s degree. Why did it take me so long, and how does it feel now?

The Beginning

This might sound silly to say, but I used to consider myself pretty smart. I don’t think I was necessarily the biggest know-it-all in my year at school, but I was certainly up there. Everyone in my family told me I could accomplish great things, and I believed so too.

From an early age, I had a slight, then passionate, interest in computer science and especially programming, partly because of my dad’s influence (he’s also a programmer), and partly because the idea of creating my own stuff, but, like, on a screen, fascinated me.

In 2017’s winter semester, a few months after I’d completed my Abitur¹, I enrolled into RWTH Aachen²’s first-semester computer science courses. The RWTH is generally considered a very difficult university, especially for computer science courses, but people also see degrees from there as pretty prestigious compared to a lot of other universities. Having never struggled in school, I thought I’d easily be good enough, and so I moved from my hometown of Neuss into student accommodation on a hill in Aachen. I was excited to start working first on my bachelor’s, then on my master’s, and probably eventually on my PhD. It’s just what smart people like me did.

The first semester, then, hit me like a brick wall.

I was overly ambitious and too confident, and I went to lectures and did coursework 100% sure that I would nail every exam. Midway into the semester, my first proper boyfriend broke up with me, and I spiraled into depression. It wasn’t the first time it had happened to me by any means; it was just the first time that it felt like it really did something permanent to me. I think through my failure at uni—which I’ll get to in a sentence or so, don’t you worry—this would’ve happened anyway, but the breakup certainly accelerated it. I didn’t feel confident anymore, in my intelligence, in my ability to live this smart-person life I’d dreamed about. Then, near the end of 2017, the first exams hit—math, math, and programming—and it was the first time I really had to study for anything. It sounds like a humble brag, but it was devastatingly difficult. I made index cards—which I still do, I think they’re great—but they weren’t enough. I hadn’t made any friends yet then, and I hadn’t realized that there are so many more ways to study. Redoing coursework from the semester, doing practice exams and old exams from previous semesters. I just studied my index cards, and I had no idea how to apply the things I learned from them. I went into the exams, and I was graded accordingly: I failed one of the math ones, I barely scraped by with a pass for the programming one, and I was so devastated that I couldn’t bring myself to even take part in the second math one.

I hadn’t been prepared for the exams, but much, much worse: I hadn’t been prepared for failure. At all.

The Inbetween

For the next few semesters, I regained my footing a little bit after gaining a small, surface-level friend group. You know, the type of people you go for lunch and study with, but not the type of people you talk to about your fears. They helped a little, and I had a pretty promising third semester, but it all didn’t really last.

I kept the friend group for a little while, but I also kept failling. And I still hadn’t developed any tools for dealing with it.

I started seeing an amazing psychiatrist³, and I went on antidepressants—the same ones I still take to this day, with a couple adjustments here and there—and therapy. The antidepressants really helped, the therapy felt good but, at least for me, it didn’t leave any lasting impact I don’t think. After however many sessions, the quota that health insurance pays for ran dry, and I couldn’t really justify paying out of pocket. I still had the meds though, which kept me stable enough.

Somewhere around this point, I started dating my current boyfriend, who I’ve now been with for over six years. Being with him made me realize that it wasn’t just failure that held me back. I wasn’t happy in Aachen. I hated my apartment, and I felt isolated and alienated by the university and the way that everyone there, and all of my friends, just seemed to have everything under control somehow. Of course, they probably didn’t, but then again: lunch-and-study friends, not tell-them-your-deepest-fears friends.

The New Beginning

So in 2022, after a lot of Covid had passed and life was slowly starting to get normal again, I left. In the span of a few months, I found an apartment in Neu-Ulm—the apartment I’m sitting in now, writing this—, my boyfriend went and viewed it for me, saw that it was great, and I applied. And with what felt like a crazy amount of luck, I got it. The first apartment I had someone view, and the first apartment I applied for. It’s not something I really believe in, but looking back, it felt a little bit like fate.

I enrolled into Ulm University⁴ for their summer semester, and a substantial amount of the credit points I had accumulated at RWTH were able to be passed over, so I didn’t have to start from scratch. There were one or two courses that I’d have to retake, but after such a long time of being so unhappy at my old university, it felt like it was going to be worth it.

It was. At first, I was still a little unhappy. I hadn’t made any new friends in Ulm yet, and it still felt like uni was a little difficult for me to manage. I also learned to live with that though. It took me a long time, but I accepted that running at full capacity—the kind of capacity that the regular course curriculum requires of you—is just not something that I’m capable of with my mental health. So I continued taking courses at my own pace, and it felt fine. It felt doable.

The Job

In late 2023, I got an email from someone at my university. I didn’t know them, but they offered me a job. I’d just passed an exam in a programming course—it was mostly Java, which I’d been using heavily for years, so it was pretty easy for me—and they asked me to take a job as a tutor in the next semester.

I didn’t think this was for me. I can’t really deal with people, especially people asking me questions or judging me or looking at me while I’m there trying to explain a thing to them. It all sounded horrifying. So I said no.

They followed up pretty quickly. What about a student job working on their project, as a programmer? I responded that I don’t think I’m cut out for that. I said I can’t work at the capacity that most people can, and besides, I’m not nearly as capable as they seem to think I am. I really said that in the email.

Still, they were adamant. They looked at my GitHub profile⁵ and they’re certain I’d be the perfect fit. So finally, I said yes.

Our first meeting, I came in to sign the contract and talk about what the job was going to entail. I was, to put it lightly, shit-scared. After hiding in a corner crying for a good half hour—not, like, an exaggeration or a figure of speech, unfortunately—I mustered up the courage and went to their office. It was a job working on an analysis tool for the programming language R. I hadn’t ever used, or even heard of, R before, and the tool was written in TypeScript, a language I’d only used very sparingly up to that point. But again, something compelled me to say yes.

This, it turns out, was one of the best decisions of my life.

The Now

I’m about to sign the contract for my fourth semester working this job. In the time since I started, I made friends that I talk to about everything. Johanna, Lars and Finnika know all about my struggles with uni, with my confidence, with how little work I feel I get done. My boss, Flo, who originally invited me into his team despite my obvious confidence issues in the first few emails, has become one of my closest friends. I’m probably sending all of them this post once I’m done writing it.

A little over half a year ago, I started on my bachelor’s thesis. Flo approached me, asking if I wanted to do it with him and his project, flowR⁶, on which I was already working for my student job. Again hesitant, and again unsure about my abilities and whether he was seeing something in me that wasn’t going to be there, I said yes.

So here I am, a little over half a year later, finally free. It does sound cheesy, but I’m not free from university, or academia, or this godforsaken bachelor’s degree that it took me so long to make happen. I’m free from the isolation and the loneliness and the agonizing feeling that I’m just not good enough. Yes, I still have fears, and I still feel inadequate a lot, but I now know in my heart that I’m just being hard on myself.

I don’t know what the moral of this story is. Is it that all you need is a miracle student job to make all your problems go away? Probably not. It was still hard, and it still took me a long time to get to this place. Throughout all this time, I thought about quitting uni so, so many times, both then in Aachen and here in Ulm. But I have a kind of courage now that I didn’t have then. Maybe the moral is that you need friends? That seems counterproductive, especially since, for people like me and maybe you, there’s no easy way to just get friends, especially the kind you can share your anxiety with. They certainly help though, and I don’t think I would’ve gotten to where I am now without them.

You know, I haven’t said this yet, but I’m staying for my master’s. I’m continuing my student job and I’m doing a master’s degree. It’s something that, before starting university, I thought of as the natural path my life would take, and then during university, I didn’t ever imagine wanting or being able to do again. I don’t know if I’ll follow through with the whole thing, or if I’ll just continue doing this job for a few semesters and then drop out and move on to something else. But I’m looking forward to trying. I really am.

To close out this ramble, I want to share a part of my bachelor’s thesis that means a lot to me. I poured a lot of work into the thesis, and I’m proud of the research I did and the code I wrote, but the thing I most want to share with you all is what I wrote in the acknowledgements⁷:

This thesis was made possible by the support of many people.

First and foremost, I would like to thank my exceedingly patient supervisor Florian, who, over our almost two years of working together, has become not only a trusted mentor, but also a close friend.

I would also like to thank some of my friends from and surrounding the flowR team, including, but not limited to, Johanna, Lars, Annika R., and Ruben, all of whom, alongside Florian, have supported me throughout my many doubts about this thesis and my work as a whole.

Finally, I extend my deepest appreciation to Nicolas, who, despite his interests not extending to query language design and linting R code, has kindly endured having to listen to my ramblings about the topic for several months, and who has lended me more emotional support than I could ever have asked for.

Thanks for reading, everyone. ❤️