To be a master you must first be a bad beginner.

It’s a fact of life, though no one really likes to hear that. Being bad at things is never enjoyable, and people don’t always like to push through the tough early stages to reach the rewards on the other side.

I have recently returned to university, but this time to study a very different degree: data science. For a girl who has studied humanities and literature most of her life, this is a big change. I am enjoying it (mostly), and I understand that this is another big challenge to overcome, but that doesn’t make it much easier.

To be perfectly honest with you, I’m finding it quite tricky. The content is so different, and code is literally a language of its own. Sometimes the lectures feel a bit ‘hocus pocus’ with all the words they use, and workshops can be tricky because even though the tutors are showing you how to solve a problem or debug the example, I don’t always get how they made their choices. I ask questions and I know this will change over time as I gain more experience, but right now I am feeling the struggle.

It got me thinking about this concept of being a bad beginner. Working in an education institute as well for my day job means I’m surrounded by learning all day and every day. It’s a blessing and a curse, but it has made me a lot more familiar with failure. As a young girl, the possibility of failing was a genuine nightmare, but now I see that it is much more common (and survivable!) than I first thought. Failures happen, second attempts are given, and sometimes people have to redo a unit—nothing life or death about that.

Now this isn’t to say I like failing or that I want to fail, but it has been important for me to learn not to fear it so much. The things we fear are only as powerful as we believe them to be, so if you take away that worry, the fear has nothing left to stand on.

True as that may be, it doesn’t always help when you’re a really bad beginner. When nothing seems to work and you’re not sure where to go to fix it (or you don’t have as much time—hello day job!), it can kind of suck.

Learning is challenging because you are literally working to create new connections in your brain. Building knowledge is especially hard when you don’t have a background in the area you’re trying to learn. But! Learning a new concept or figuring out a problem that has been troubling you gives such a rush!

Only a few weeks into the first semester, we had a small assignment to work on for the first project. Worth 7 points, it was no great loss if you didn’t do too well in this, but I wanted to start well in the course.

We had to write a short program that passed a few different tests, and I was struggling. I had the basic outline, and I knew what I wanted it to do, but nothing was working. I did what I could around work, and went to the drop-in workshop session the day before it was due. Hoping for some help, I got a couple questions answered and then it all started to click!

I submitted my first attempt to the grading marker and got a measly 1 out of 7. Great start. Honestly, I spent most of the afternoon tweaking everything in the code and revising all the course materials to figure out what was going wrong. I resubmitted: 2/7.

That was enough to feel like a complete win haha. I needed that, and it actually encouraged me to keep going. I was so happy to even get one extra point that when I slowly started getting 3, 4 and 5.5 correct, I was over the moon. I did have to go out that evening, so my time working on the code was cut short. The next night, I figured out the last of it (default values, girl, default values!) and submitted for a final result of 7/7. Woohoo!

Now, I’m sure you’ve seen a funny little graph like this before, which shows the roller coaster ride that is learning a new skill: (x-axis is Time while y-axis is amount of confidence you have).

There is usually a bit of a honeymoon period when you first start out, where everything seems easy. Your confidence skyrockets (1). Then you hit a road bump—then another one, and finally your confidence plummets (2) and your progress grinds to a halt as you believe you’ll never be able to do anything ever again (3). It’s a funny little trick our brains play on us. I’m sure there is some evolutionary reason why we should stay stuck where we are, but whatever it is you must ignore the lizard brain! Get up and keep going, you can do this (4). It’ll never be smooth sailing, but if you ride the ups and downs as they come, you’ll find your way (5).

Currently, my lizard brain is not very happy about all the coding I’m trying to learn because my programs rarely work. It’s been a steep learning curve, and I fear I’m not even knowledgeable enough in the area to ask for the actual help I need. Still, there is only one way forward, and I’m not ready to give up yet.

The good thing about programming is that you get immediate feedback. Either the code works, it works a little bit, or it doesn’t work at all. You write something, run it, and get your results straight away. Unfortunately, when it displays absolutely nothing for the 200^th time, it can get a little frustrating. But when it does finally work, there is such a sense of joy, relief, and satisfaction that makes it all (mostly) worth it.

I took up this degree for many reasons, but chief among them was to challenge myself in a new area. The world is changing rapidly, and I want to keep up with it. I am a little anxious that I started so late, but I always come back to the old saying:

It’s never too late to try something new!