Whether you’re in your first or last term of university, keep experiencing new things. 
“Deep breaths, deep breaths, deep breaths,” I repeat as I walk up the steps to the Thorvaldson  building, trying to calm my racing heart.

The sun isn’t shining exceptionally bright today, nor is it snowing cats or dogs. It’s just a typical Saturday in February in Saskatoon with some clouds and rays of light. The weather is clearly telling me that today will not be an especially monumental Disney-movie-moment where I go through an exceptional character change. Yet, for the first time in my life, I am going to take part in a coding competition.

The Department of Computer Science runs two programming contests yearly, one in February and one in November. In each contest, you are given a set of coding problems to solve in a set time frame individually or in teams of two to three.  

Now, there will be two types of reactions from people who are reading this article. The first group will think, why is she overreacting – it’s just a competition. The other will know exactly how it feels to put yourself out there and be vulnerable.

I’m wearing a pearl and heart-shaped necklace made by a dear friend and a pink knitted sweater, with my hair in a slick-back bun. Even if we can’t crush the coding, at least we can look good while failing, right? We’re changing the definition of computer scientists one pink sweater at a time.

I walk into Spinks, the computer science wing of the university, and breathe out a sigh of relief after spotting my teammates. You didn’t think I was going to do this alone did you? No way! Having gone into a male-dominated field, with most of my professors and peers being male, the computer science girlies, as we like to call ourselves, stick together. 

We were already a small portion of the composition of first-year classes, so from the beginning we all made an unspoken pact to help each other out. We’ve created a safe space for ourselves where you  feel like you  can ask all those “stupid” and “dumb” questions and work together to understand the complexity of Big-Oh notation and AVL trees.

“We are second-year computer science students, so we have some coding knowledge under our belts,” one of my teammates says while we wait in line to register and sign up for the competition. 

“We know how to write ‘if’ statements and loops,” adds the other. 

All of us are trying to convince ourselves and each other that even if we don’t solve the question, we know enough that we can at least write something.

We make it to the front of the line, and in a shaking voice, I tell Jeff Long, a beloved computer science professor known for his love of Pokémon, my name and my teammates’. He leads us to grab a t-shirt and breakfast with a set of instructions for the remainder of the day, and gives me a scrap of paper with our login and team information. So now, while I try not to seem like I am dying of anxiety surrounded by people who are much older and have done this multiple times, I also have to make sure I don’t somehow misplace our team information.

I am two years into this degree. Shouldn’t it get easier at this point? 

When does it get easier?! I internally scream to the academic gods.

My teammates and I enter the computer science lab to start the practice session. 

“Oh let’s sit at the computer in the far corner,” one of my teammates says. 

We all agree that this is the optimal location to receive the least amount of judgement from our peers. As we sit at the “Computer 1 Location,” another team shows up and says we are sitting in their spot. I guess the number on that piece of paper that Jeff had given me actually corresponded to something. Oops!

But don’t worry, the story gets better. Our new and official seat is smack dab in the centre of the room with four other teams in the same cramped space as us.

After many failed attempts at logging into the competition website due to entering the incorrect password, we finally start doing some practice questions. We crush the first question. Print “Hello World” to the console. We get to the third question when they announce the actual competition will start now.

I feel better. We were able to attempt three out of the four questions in 30 minutes. 

We can figure out the twelve coding questions amongst the three of our brains, I tell myself.

We all randomly grab a question from the given stack. However, after a few minutes of uncertainty and shy smiles, one of my teammates and I decide to put both of our brains together and solve the first question. We upload our code to the website and anxiously wait for the computer to run our code through the test cases. To our absolute delight it works! One out of 12 done! We are crushing this!

Did I speak too soon?

The road starts getting rocky.

We try and try and try some more, but half of our coded answers only pass some of the tests and then hit a failed one. To make matters worse, we don’t even know what test cases the computer is trying or which one it failed at, which adds to the difficulty of figuring out what is wrong with our code.

After what feels like an eternity of failures later, we get another question! My teammates and I start cheering and laughing hysterically. I am sure the people around us think we’ve won the Nobel Peace Prize because of how loudly we rejoice. I can’t honestly remember the last time academia has made me laugh this much since high school. When did school become so serious and stressful? As we age, where does the joy of learning something new go?

The contest time ends on that note of laughter. Don’t ask me what place we got. It’s top secret and confidential information. But did my teammates and I have tons of fun? A thousand times yes.

The icing on top of the cake was that my teammate’s twin baked us salted chocolate chip cookies as our prize. The winning team may have gotten a selection of prizes from hoodies, toques, water bottles and stress balls, but we got a warm, oozy chocolate goodness made with love.

Dear reader, while gruelling, academia and your university experience can  and should be enjoyed. You can’t spend the next four years or the remainder of your degree just trying to submit the next assignment, staying up until three a.m. trying to solve that math question or not being able to fall asleep because of the stress of university. Have fun, laugh lots and try something new even knowing you are going to completely and utterly embarrass yourself. No one has time to think you’re stupid. They’re too focused on getting their own pieces of code to run.

Take the plunge.

No matter what stage in your degree, keep being vulnerable and try something new.

Oh, and I hope to see some of you in the coding competitions this year. A word of advice if you are interested– brush up on your knowledge of reading from stdin.