advice to students: always be competing
"Always be competing," or ABC, is my advice to students; even to those studying computer science in the age of AI.
I’ve always found joy in programming. And I’ve discovered this love towards computers when I was about 10 years old. I was coding in Basic, then Pascal, and then Visual Basic. But I never had a formal education in programming at that point; I was dabbling in goto statements.
Much later, in high school, there was a county competition on algorithms. I had no idea what those were but I started looking into it because of my mom who enrolled me into the competition. I had no interest however in competing against others. I was participating because of my mom.
However, another colleague of mine from high school won the 1st place and I didn’t even qualify for a prize. This failure started a yearning inside of me and for the next year I kept learning on my own. Fast forward to next year and I had won that 1st prize myself, and the year after, and the year after that. I had become good, not the best but pretty damn good. As you can see on my resume, competitions have been the storyline of my career.
I have a child now and I often think how should I raise them, what skills should I instill in them? My answer: teaching them to “always be competing.” It’s not computer science, although I’d love to do that with them, but more importantly the never ending desire to compete to out-best themselves!
Find your passion. Then, compete! You’ll learn invaluable hard lessons that will make you a better person. And, remember, the competition is with yourself, not others.
What's your advice to students? Curious to hear your thoughts at paul@borza.ro