As of May 5th, 2022, I’ve officially finished my Sophomore academic year at Notre Dame. It is truly crazy just typing that out, and I would do anything to have time slow down. But the inevitable march of time trudges on.

When I look back on my Sophomore year, it was hard. Not enough people warn you about the transition from being a Freshman to a Sophomore — hell, even the transition from Sophomore fall to Sophomore spring! One day you are a little Freshman where your biggest worry is finding your classroom and then suddenly you’re worrying about finding an internship in the real world. I think that is the most difficult part of Sophomore year: reality slaps you in the face. For me, this happened around Winter Break when I was scrambling to get an Internship for the summer. Luckily, I was able to get one and I actually start tomorrow (May 16th).

Academically, it is said that Sophomore year at Notre Dame (specifically Spring semester & CSE) is one of the most difficult. I don’t know if I really agree with this sentiment, but I will say that it is when you really find out if you love coding or not. I enjoyed coding Freshman year (and Sophomore Fall), but I don’t know if I would say I loved it. I think this can be boiled down to the fact that I just didn’t really know enough. Sophomore Fall I took Fundamentals of Computing and Discrete Mathematics. While these were enjoyable classes, they didn’t make me … curious. This past Spring semester, however, I took

  • Systems Programming
  • Data Structures
  • Logic Design and Sequential Circuits
  • Linear Algebra & Differential Equations
  • The Climate Crisis

In the world of programming, these 2 semesters were worlds apart. While Fall taught me the basics of programming, Spring really started going into the cooler stuff (concurrency, sockets, comp architecture, memory layout…) Specifically, Systems Programming was a course that really opened my eyes to the broader field of Computer Science; it led me down rabbit-holes of self research.

The workload was intense, but I ended up doing well enough to land on the College of Engineering’s Dean List both semesters.

As time rolls on, I am just falling more and more in love with Computer Science. My only hope for the upcoming year is that this trend does not stop :-)