"Hello World"

Well, this is the first entry of my SLOG. I’ve never really written a blog before but I’ll try my best to keep it interesting. Besides, it won’t hurt to get some practice on my writing skills. I’ve never really had an interest in reading and writing. I’ve always felt that I was therefore good at math and that is what I should pursue. I didn’t mind math, but wasn’t crazy about it either. I especially hated the repetitiveness of arithmetic practice problems. What I was very much in love with was computers and programming. I taught myself since I was 13, how to make games on flash and design websites. I knew that eventually, if I were to pursue computer science in university that I’d have to do a lot of math. This was something that I had a hard time understanding. When I was coding in HTML, I never found the need to know what a contrapositive was, or even what a polynomial was. Programming felt closer to writing an instruction manual than doing math. So what is the need to know all of the higher level math material if I haven’t even come across a need to use it?

            Things became clear immediately during my first classes of MAT 137 and CSC 165. I was taught in both classes about logic and If => then statements and I finally understood why I needed these math courses. I was very pleasantly surprised to find out that the math I will be learning now will be different from what I’ve been learning so far. The university content challenges me to think, reason with logic, and to design a way to retrieve and display the proofs of my solutions, as opposed to the mindless and repetitive rule following that was high school math. This new math feels more like programming to me, and I experience the same kind of joy from solving a problem and writing code.

            So far, the course material has been very interesting to me and has been a thrill to learn. I seemed to have developed a “thirst for learning”, especially in math. While my friends from different majors have complained to me that they can’t stop themselves from falling asleep every lecture, I have found every class to be very entertaining, and taught at the right pace. I hope things stay this way forever.