Day in the life of a Computer Science major
Gooood Morninggg blog!!
My name is Rizouana and I am a junior! I am super excited to walk you through my day as a computer science major! It’s Tuesday, my busiest day of the week. I picked this day to highlight because I figured I would have things to talk about rather than being like “I spent the next 2 hours debugging my code and that’s about it.”
I woke up at 8 am. and headed out for my morning run. I started running this semester after seeing everyone training for marathons over the summer. Honestly, I never thought I’d say this, but running is actually kinda fun—once you get past the leg cramp phase. I’m still dealing with that, but I’ve definitely improved since day one. Here’s a picture from my run today, Rochester is so pretty during this time of the year.
After the run, I took a shower, made breakfast, and got ready for the day. Here’s a fit check, quarter zip because Rochester is getting chilly!
My first class of the day is CSC 172: Data Structures and Algorithms at 9:40 am. I started college as a Neuroscience major and switched to being a CS major during the spring semester of my sophomore year. That’s why I am taking this class later than other CS majors.
After class I had a shift from 11 am to 2 pm at the Simon Business School, I work as a Computer Consultant at their IT help desk. Work is chill most of the time, I help students and professors troubleshoot any technical issues with Blackboard, Microsoft Office, and other Simon-specific software. The dopamine rush from being able to solve a technical problem is truly unmatched. This is me at work:
After work, I had another class called Civil Disobedience for my minor in Environmental Humanities. This is my only humanities class for the semester and it’s such a lovely break from all of my CS classes. It runs from 2 pm to 4:40 pm because we only meet once a week. I genuinely love humanities classes because of how structure-free yet thought-provoking they are. Today we talked about how changes occur from a cumulations of small actions rather than it being a huge deal from the start. As much as I like CS and problem solving I am such a humanities girl at heart.
After class ended me and my friends met up to get dinner at Danforth dining hall. Believe it or not, this is my first time at a dining hall after being back on campus. It’s because I have a kitchen in Southside and I often get things from the Hillside Market to warm them up or cook my dinner at home. Plus I always eat lunch at California Rollin, I know my declining is suffering. This was the spread and honestly not bad.
After dinner, I had another class at 6:15 pm called CSC 214: IOS Mobile App Development. We are learning SwiftUI and it’s so cool to be building app features in this class. I like that this is an application-based class rather than being theory-heavy.
After this class, I had workshop for CSC 172 which runs from 7:40 pm to 8:55 pm, I know it’s so lateee. But this was the only open spot and it fit my schedule so here we are. The workshops are nice because we get to discuss CS concepts in small groups and work through problems together.
After the workshop ended I was so cooked but we must push through because it’s recruiting season and I need to land an internship for the summer. So I went to the library with my best friend and roommate, worked on some applications, and reviewed the lecture for my mobile app class. By the time I was done, it was almost midnight, and time to head home. I called my parents when I got home, did my skincare, and went to bed.
Good night blog!!
Huge disclaimer: not every day looks like this, I usually don’t have back-to-back classes and have a lot more free time during the day to study.