I Just Feel Like Writing About This

The title doesn’t really give anything away about the content, so what is it about? So I watched a TED talk the other day from Susan Cain, “The power of introverts”, and she also touches the topic about introverts in school. I just want to give my experience on this topic, not about introverts in school, but in university.

I would consider myself an introvert right now, however, when I was younger I wasn’t as introverted as I currently am. This was especially true in the first years of my secondary education, however, it started to shift as soon as I got into programming. Earlier, I was completely fine working in bigger groups and that pretty often. It wasn’t too common in school, but it happened every now and then. So it was all nice and dandy until that point. But what changed when I got into programming?

When I started, I began with creating simple HTML pages (I know, this is not considered programming…), which felt like programming for me at the time (which was around the age of 13~14) and I had fun doing so. No one really helped me and I just tried things out by myself and educated myself. This isn’t a big accomplishment on it’s own and I certainly don’t feel like it is. It’s just like every other first step into a certain direction. But it wasn’t just a first step of learning programming, it was also a first step into knowing how to teach myself.

But what about school? I was still in secondary education so shouldn’t school be the one “teaching” me? The thing is, programming is not considered “general knowledge” here as of right now (I would at least take some ideas from it and integrate it into the curriculum somewhere, but that’s another story). It’s not what everybody needs to know to a big extend and it’s just me who’s having a bigger interest. Wait a minute, though. Not everyone will have interest in programming, I get that, but they certinaly will have interest in something else that is also not tought in school which might result in their job or something that they will really need in their later life. Again, that would also be too specific for the content of what the school is teaching. However, the process of learning something that you’re interested in without someone helping you is a good and needed experience. Why? You certainly don’t need this skill in school do you? Not really no, because that’s not what school is about (it just teaches you the basic knowledge to understand other things). But everything that comes after that is relying on it.

Jump a bit forward in time, I’m in my first semester of studying applied computer science. Been continuing to look more into programming throught the time in between. Trying out new languages to see new concepts, doing small projects to get some experience and read up on best practices and whatnot. Also, if you do a lot of programming, you will sometimes get into the position to learn more about the OS, memory and generally how things work in computer, so I had some knowledge of those things too. Because of all of this, the first semester was pretty easy, for me at least. I either already knew what the professors were talking about or would have something in mind that’s similar to the problem they proposed (like OOP, binary system, logic, etc.). When I looked around at the other students, I could see several other people who are doing as great as I did, if not even better. But I also saw some people struggling. Not that they didn’t like computer science, they just struggled learning or understanding the content.

So I looked at what they did to solve this -well- issue. I couldn’t help but notice that most of them were relying on others, or more to the point, relying on the help of others. I mean, not an occassional small question when they really weren’t able to figure it out, but actually relied on others to help them understand it several times. Some people might consider this as standard group learning, but I don’t really feel the appeal of that. The problem is that this doesn’t work in the long run as there won’t always be people around you helping you get those things into your brain. The problem feels like they never really learned “how” to learn without someone else, who understood it, telling them.

Now, why did I focus so much on the fact that I’m an introvert and introverts in general in the beginning? The thing is, since I, as an introvert, never really felt like I want to stay in groups for a long time, I was more often than not put in a situation where I was forced to figure out things on my own. This is the point where you start to train yourself how to learn new things. Sure, this might take time, but given I stayed alone many times, this wasn’t too big of an issue. As I’ve mentioned, by the time I came to university, I already teached myself most of the things we did in the first semester(s). This already helps in the lecture itself, how to sort the new information raining onto you, and these things most of the other people clearly lacked.

I mean, working in a group certainly has an advantage. Such as being able to get the opinion of several people and then working out the best way to do a certain task. On the other hand, being able to just focus on the problem, without other people possibly interrupting your thought is way more appealing for me. And I think this is what most other introverts will think too. I don’t want to say that this “superior” in some way, I just think that when you get thrown into an unknown situation, it’s easier to work with that situation when you know how to handle things. And since we’re talking about school and university here, the situation you get thrown in when you come from secondary school to university is that you have to learn things yourself. It’s not like the professors don’t care how well you do at all, no (at least that’s what it’s like here). But they certainly care less than the teachers in school.

Coming to a close, I certainly don’t want to say that “Hey, introverts are so much better at this!”. However, I do believe that to some extend people should be a bit more introvert at times. I mean sure, everyone thinks differently and might not be able to figure things out as well as I did for me, but hey, you might as well try. And given how much easier it felt for me when coming to university, I think it’s definitely worth it.