Balancing of Perceptions

With October coming to a close, highschool students in Ontario will have to make decisions about which university to apply to.  At the same time, the DCS Ambassadors at UofT are hard at work undergoing training in preparation for this year’s upcoming events and school visitations.

Because most of last year’s Ambassadors are on PEY, we basically have a completely new group of Ambassadors this year.  After having met with, and even worked with, these people;  I’m definitely excited about working with this year’s group.

One of the main topics of discussion in our DCS Ambassadors training this year is “why CS?” and “why CS at UofT?”.  I’ve already touched on this topic in some previous posts here and here.  During the training sessions, we were each tasked with giving a short 5 – 10 minute presentation about why we personally chose CS.

Most of the answers that I’ve heard so far fell right in line with my personal philosophies.  I heard a lot of answers along the lines of: “I wanted to promote CS as something more than a code-monkey project”, “you get to reach out and help people“, “your work is practical”, etc. etc. you get the idea.

But something was nagging at me the whole time throughout the training sessions.  The points were all great but it was the presentations that worried me.  Were we being too optimistic?

Now don’t get me wrong, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with putting CS in a good light.  God knows that our profession has a bad enough reputation in the real world.  But there’s a fine line between debunking those myths and painting a picture of CS is full of rainbows and sunshine, where daisies are always in bloom and unicorns prance around the fields all day.

I remember going through the exact same issues with Victoria while we were preparing our high school visit presentation deck.  We spent an entire afternoon just deciding on points that we could both believe in.  CS may be fun, practical and useful; but at the end of the day, we’re still sleeping over in the labs, we’re still coding away in to the wee hours of the morning, and yes, our jokes are geeky.  Some people like that and some people don’t.  That’s the reality of the situation, its a fine line that we have to walk and its hard.

So whenever I talk to kids, I try to keep two things in mind: always tell the truth, and never lie

Because fundamentally, I do believe that you’re more than a code-monkey, you do get to help people with your work, and your work is practical.  But is it for everyone?  No way.  Was it easy? Not unless you like working on UML diagrams all night in a raccoon infested lab.  It takes hard work and persistence, but if you can get through it then you’re in for a real treat.

Maybe this way of doing things is too pessimistic, but hell, at least this way I can live with the things that I’ve said.   I mean, we’re not playing around here, this is a crucial moment for a lot of the younger students.  And as much as I’d love to see more students in CS, I wouldn’t want anyone to join under the assumption that it was going to be easy.

Any thoughts?