May fail CS Entry-level courses. What do I do?

Don't worry about fucking up your college career/life; mistakes and the subsequent course corrections are part of the college learning experience (or at the very least, should be/were before the recent push to make everyone graduate as fast as humanly possible).

The most valuable, powerful, and seemingly cliche piece of advice I can give you is to do what you love. Don't let anyone else's notion of optimality cloud your choice. It's true that CS offers amazing rewards and opportunities for those who can pursue it, but don't for a moment make yourself take this course in life because you think it's the only way you can succeed.

Now to the question of passion.. How do you feel about staying up until the early hours of the morning and eschewing social opportunities to solve difficult programming problems/obligations? Do you find yourself looking up CS resources for fun and to better your own problem solving/programming skills? Do you feel sufficiently rewarded when your code compiles after hours of labor and debugging? Do you enjoy the people/culture of the field?

I can't say that all of these questions are relevant to every CS major's experience, but they're all very real considerations to take into account because unless you have the time management of an accountant and are a coding savant, CS will be a difficult experience. No way around it. You will be forced to juggle programming languages and deadlines, and as you encounter segfault after segfault in your assignments, you will begin to despair, get angry, and want to give up. Then, to add insult to injury, your sacrifices will be casually judged by recruiters every career fair. So, what am I trying to say? At the end of the day, passion, more than ability or anything else, will define your chances in this major because it's the thing that keeps you from giving up when your code crashes for the Nth time, when you're running into the Nth deadline, and you have 0 fucks left to give.

TLDR: Don't worry about the pitfalls. If you love what you do, you'll find a way. Promise.

/r/UTAustin Thread