This article by Humans of IT Student Ambassador Dustin Thompson, a Computer Science senior from the University of Central Florida is part of our Student Ambassador Spotlight series in the lead-up to Microsoft Ignite. Dustin shares about his unconventional journey into computer science and offers some advice and encouragement to students that may be going through similar circumstances.
To say that my path to becoming a computer scientist was straightforward would be a lie. In fact, I didn’t even understand what a logarithm was going into college. Let’s rewind the clocks a couple of decades.
Rough Start
I was born to a mother that really wants to see me succeed. During the formative years of my life, she spent a lot of energy reading with me, teaching me Russian, and shuffling me to piano lessons and baseball practice. However, things quickly took a much rougher turn and as a developing kid, I did not take this change in direction well. The situation at home got hectic - I started rebelling, and before you know it, I was cutting class about as often as I would be failing assignments and tests. Needless to say, I was not a good kid. To add to my unconventional background, I studied theater growing up, not programming. I went to arts schools from 6th to 12th grade. My big plan was to graduate, move to L.A., and live life as a bohemian artist in hopes of making it in Hollywood. When I saw how that worked out for a friend of mine who got his GED and tried to make an early start, I got scared straight. But what does a guy who graduates in the bottom 10% of his class do at that point?
Crossroads
“No way I’m considering the military,” I thought. After some research, I discovered that community colleges did not often require specific GPA requirements. The inevitable choice for me was to go back to school and take a stab at college. I remember on the ride home from orientation, feeling lost, scared, yet oddly inspired - I was thinking back on my early days when I was a productive young boy. I thought about how much I loved science, music, and other fruitful subjects growing up. I thought that if I’m going to do this, I might as well go all the way and major in something STEM-related, just like my 7-year-old self would’ve wanted. Well, after a slow, slow two and a half years, I finally managed to get into the University of Central Florida’s CECS department. The shock of transferring was painful. On top of financial and lifestyle burdens, I felt so demotivated by how little I knew and how ridiculous my background was compared to my peers. All around me, fellow students had years of experience in tech whereas I wasn’t even capable of printing Hello World to the screen yet.
It wasn’t until after a year at UCF that I finally started to come out of my shell.
I took some professors that changed my life and indirectly introduced me to some lifelong friends. They showed me how to be proactive, how to apply the skills I learn in class, and how to find opportunities. Because of them, I started landing interviews and going to events. I attended my first hackathon at HackGT 6.
(HackGT 6)
I wrote an interpreter from scratch in Python at that event. This was two semesters after first learning how to code.
The purpose of all that was to illustrate a point repeated so often that it’s often regarded as background noise: Success isn’t a straight line. I mean, if you told me back in high school that I’d end up playing around with C++ graphics libraries in my free time, I’d proudly display the C++ I managed to pull off on my math quiz that day. Don’t think that just because you didn’t get the head start that many others around you got, you’re destined for failure or even just mediocrity. I hope to be able to convey this message through the Microsoft Humans of IT program this year.
Some Advice
Get involved. You can’t simply rely on luck to get where you want. Join a club at your university or start one if you’re feeling ambitious! Participate in events held by universities and companies such as hackathons like OpenHack (see more: https://openhack.microsoft.com/ & https://mlh.io/seasons/na-2020/events) and conferences like Microsoft Ignite (see more: https://myignite.microsoft.com/home). Try to explore your passions as well. Are you taking a bunch of discrete math courses but are really curious about how AI works? Find an AI club at your school or try to get a head start on learning via the Internet. The world is your oyster so make use of it. Believe me, you’ll surprise yourself - just as I was surprised by my own journey.
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