What My Professor Taught Me on Day One

Today was my first day of classes for this Fall Semester at Iowa State University, and I noticed something. In my COMS 3310 class, which is Theory of Computation, the professor had us all go around and list our name, major, year and what we did over the summer. Normally this is uncommon in university classes, since there's normally tens to hundreds of students and can sometimes feel like a waste, but the professor had a reason. As all of us students started listing off what we did over the summer, you started hearing the word 'internship' from every student's mouth.

There's a few reasons this was a cool experience to me: one is that the professor deliberately wanted to show us how even though the news makes it seem software/hardware/computer science jobs are scarce, students aren't doing as bad as it seems. This seemed to light a spark in a lot of people, and encouraged us since we were able to see our direct peers' accomplishments.

The other awesome thing about this was that it showed me how our professors do care about their students. He surely didn't have to go around and have each of us talk, especially since there's 40 kids in the class and it took up 10 out of the 55 total minutes, but he chose to.

If you're still reading this, your main takeaway should be to not stress so much about the market news, or what you read online on a Reddit thread - focus on yourself and work to learn, and apply your skills! Peace!