Feelings at Software College

It’s been over two months since I bid farewell to Accounting in July and came to the Software College. What I’ve experienced here is an entirely different kind of academic life.

The first word that comes to mind is: tough. The study life here is no longer the relaxed, leisurely routine of lectures in the morning, sleeping in the afternoon, and playing games at night. Instead, I genuinely feel the pressure: weekly engineering progress reports mean you can’t relax for even half a day; solving a technical problem in a program often requires researching materials until one or two in the morning; the IELTS Listening Test gives you a lot of hard times; textbooks that used to take a full semester to cover — now you’re given about half a month.

But even though every day is nerve-wracking, what you gain after the pain is greater joy and satisfaction: the first time I dragged a mouse to draw my own graphics on screen, the first time I split an MP3 in half with my own program and played each half separately, the first time I typed on another computer through the network using my own program, the first time my program instantly solved a matrix multiplication that previously would have taken me an entire evening. This sense of achievement and fulfillment — I’d never experienced anything like it before.

Most importantly, the Software College has brought a change in my philosophy of learning. Before, I always felt that knowledge had to be taught by the teacher — if the teacher didn’t cover it, I wouldn’t know it, and that was only natural. Now, the teaching model at the Software College has made me understand that teachers can’t follow you around for life, and your knowledge can’t cover everything. The most important thing is to have the ability to learn on your own. As our teacher Simon put it, “Reasoning well and research well are more important than the accumulation of facts.”