Programming is My Passion

Blog by AJ on 5 June 2024

If I could redo my college degree, I would double major in biology and computer science with a minor in sociology. I love biology, genetics, and medicine and I love what I learned in my program. But I wasn't prepared for how gatekeeping works in medicine. To become a practicing physician, you must go to medical school. If you can't afford it and can't take out the loans, you would need to excel academically to receive grants or scholarships. My 3.1 GPA was not going to get me any of those.

I worked full time for 3 years to save up for one semester of my undergrad, before my parents finally agreed to cosign my student loans. They would not do that for my graduate studies. But I still applied as I needed to get in before I could worry about paying for it. Each year's rejections I would take in stride and simply work on adding more to my application or on improving my writing to advocate for myself as to why I would make a great student in their program.

How It Started

Finally after 5 years, I've stopped trying and realized that it was probably for the best. One of the ways I tried to make my application stand out was learning Python. I was reading that Python was an important scripting language in data science and bioinformatics. I still had my student email so I was able to take a professional certificate course in Python for free through Coursera. This had probably no effect on my medical school applications, but it had a profound effect on me. I was immediately in love.

I was learning how to parse documents, make HTTP request, read and write to a database, and other concepts that I just assumed required an engineering degree. All the IT/information technology courses I had ever taken up to this point only taught me how to use existing programs. It was never mentioned that I could make my own programs, in fact the opposite was told growing up. My first computer course was a mandatory typing class in middle school. We were told that if we messed around and tried to use the programs in ways they weren't intended, then we were “hackers.”

Self-taught programmer was not a thing or at least extremely uncommon at that time. You were either a legit professional or a begrudged evildoer. Leave it the experts they said. My interest were elsewhere, so I was fine doing just that. I just assumed it worked like medicine. You get into a special program where they teach you the secret knowledge and give you the magic tools to make the mystifying programs. All I knew about computers was play Sims 2 and watch anime in 20-minute 3 part chunks on YouTube.

But here I was pressing buttons my keyboard making my laptop do things that I never knew it could do. Am I a good programmer? No, but how good a programmer I become is entirely up to me. I don't need a letter of recommendation or high test scores to get anyone's approval to learn more. And as long as I keep learning, this is the worst I'll ever be at it. I'm only limited by my own personal drive & effort.

I will still continue to continue to learn more about biology, chemistry, and medicine in my free time, because I just find it amazingly fascinating. Even though none of my studying or passion for it will ever get me closer to my now abandoned dream. There is no such things a self-taught doctor and no path to legitimacy outside of medical school.

I'm not ever sure if there should be though. A major benefit of the narrow gate into medicine is that there are very few bad doctors. It just isn't worth going through if you don't really want it. This makes hearing news about bad doctors particularly vexing since they got through when I couldn't.

How It's Going

Would I have made a good doctor? Looking at my personality now, I have some doubts. My social battery has gone from a lead-acid power station to a single AAA alkaline cell. I really enjoy and prefer my own quiet time. I like just being able to do things at my own pace. My personality would need to be completely differently had I been accepted. Who I've become now is better suited for programming than medicine. And I'm excited to see where it'll take me. Hopefully I can one day buy a little spot of land and escape this tiny apartment to be the mysterious forest dweller I was truly meant to be!

It would have been great to have had the structure of higher education curriculum and the pressure of soul crushing student loans debt to learn programming, but I'm happy with the progress I've made through many great and free resources. I've learned a tiny bit of web development which is how I've made this blog and I've started Harvard's free CS50 course to learn the foundations of computer science before getting into machine learning. There's so much I want to do to showcase what I'm learning. I'm on my way to becoming the “hacker” I was told not to be.

Timeline of Learning

Here's what I currently have planned down the pipeline for my learning track. The goal is to focus on projects that fun and meaningful to me.

1. Javascript and CSS: Adding dark-mode to my blog
2. Javascript and CSS: Creating an SVG annimation for my avatar
3. Pyhton and C++: Building a desktop application to help with focus and meditation while coding
4. Python and C++: Creating a voice model from scratch
5. Mojo: Creating a multi-modal voice model from scratch

Ongoing and upcoming Projects will be added to my GitHub. Looking forward to sharing more!

Thank you for reading my post! I would love to know your thoughts on this subject. Hit me up on Bluesky @aiwithaj.bsky.social or the socials below!