Accepting my Technical Skill Gap

My final semester at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) just started, and at the 11th hour I made a course correction: I decided against taking the School of Computer Science’s (SCS) much-praised and often-suffered-through Cloud Computing (CC) course.

CC is among the legendary courses at CMU’s SCS, right up there with the school’s coursework on Operating Systems, Machine Learning, and Distributed Systems. For many at our school and beyond the course is one of the courses that “you just have to take”, because “you’re from CMU”, “dude”.

After a week in the Cloud, I am convinced that this course is not for me. Some of my reasons are personal, others circumstantial; some may be relatable, others may have you wondering “wth?”. Here they are:

First, I took a hard look at return to effort of taking CC. From conversations with people far braver — and smarter — than myself, it became clear that the effort in CC was mainly focused around configuration and set-up. Cloud concepts and programming in a cloud-first world, which I perceive as “return” in my future career? Still covered, sure. Still getting exposure, definitely. But would I be able to focus after tinkering with settings and configs over sleepless nights? I did not trust myself enough to do so.

I am super thrilled — and even more thankful! — that my friends and colleagues pointed out my flawed thinking. To everyone who kept my ambitions — and ego — in check, you deserve a cookie! :)

Second, I realised that there is a wide and deep technical skill gap between where I currently am and where I should be before taking CC. At the abyss of this skill gap, I balked — accepting my technical shortcomings, rather than addressing them through sweat and toiling.

At CMU, opportunities for learning abound. Every weekend brings a case competition; an entrepreneurship contest; or an assignment you can turn into a home-run rather than a simple walk back to home base. Seizing these opportunities is part of the CMU experience. But seizing these opportunities also takes time; and I am excited that I allowed myself to take that time.

Third, and finally, I learned most from group experienced and team-work at CMU. Much of my work in CC would have happened in the rather narrow confines of various remote instances, a slew of terminals, and myself, coding away in the middle of the night.

Team projects on entrepreneurship, group activities on negotiation, and paired exercises on user-research —these experiences allow me to selfishly exploit my classmates’ ingenuity and talents. And I won’t miss this experience while here at CMU.

Related posts:

Samsung lunched recently the highly anticipated #galaxy #note8 , although the galaxy s8 was a success . But samsung fans -and haters-still remember the disastrous galaxy note 7 . So note 8 is the…

I know I have to report any income including life insurance and it can effect it greatly. I have not sent in the claim papers yet. I called SS today and thought I would give them a heads up about it…