A rollercoaster ride to finding my passion in computer science

– Ruth Agbaji –

CEO & Founder at TheGradSpark

[dropcap]I[/dropcap] grew up in an academic environment. My father was into biochemistry research and my mom was a chemistry professor. They were – and still are – forward thinking people. As such, we were one of few families in the early 90s to own a commodore 64! I absolutely loved to tinker with it. My mom was the handy-man of the house and I took after tinkering with everything – especially electronics – and destroying a few in the process. When it was time to pick a major, I just naturally aligned with electrical engineering because there wasn’t a ton of awareness of computer science and its potential back then. Growing up (keep reading to find out where), you were encouraged to either be a doctor, engineer, lawyer or accountant. Nothing else was ‘prestigious’ enough.

I decided to use this new-found knowledge to build something that benefited my community.

Towards the end of my degree, I was feeling very unfulfilled. I found the approach my college took to electrical engineering very theoretical and I was not enjoying the lack of practicality. As part of an electrical engineering major, we were required to take two computer science courses; FORTRAN and BASIC. These were terribly archaic programming languages and sparked no interest in me. A friend randomly told me about the modern (at the time) ASP.NET framework that Microsoft had released and showed me a web application he had built with it. This got me excited! This was something I could do and could love. I could create something from nothing with just a few words and a laptop! I was sold! I started to learn C# on my own. Because the internet was really bad in Nigeria at that time – we’re talking a couple of KB/s – I spent many sleepless nights downloading software and tutorials that I could use to explore this exciting new world of computer science. I decided to use this new-found knowledge to build something that benefited my community.

Having a mother as a professor gave me a glimpse of her struggle under the heavy load of assessing theoretical classes. Most classes at the time had 100 – 500 plus students enrolled in a class without teaching assistants. As such, grading became a laborious task. So, I chose to build an automated assessment system where professors could set multiple choice questions and have students take tests online and receive immediate automated feedback on their performance. Realizing this was way more complex than the simple tutorials I had been learning with, I knew I needed some mentoring. I reached out to some random blogger in India who had written some of the tutorials I had been studying with and asked if he would mentor me. I thought it was a long shot and there was no way he would pay attention to a To my surprise, he responded enthusiastically and became my mentor! I started to build the e-assessment prototype for my department and I fell more and more in love with computer science. It turned out to be an impressive project that everyone was excited about at that point. This experience helped me see that I had found my calling.

I really did hack my way into computer science.

My next step was to pursue this new-found love in a strong educational system. I knew that my middle-class parents were unable to pay the high fees for graduate programs abroad. So, I spent many more sleepless nights scouring the internet for scholarships and prepping for the GRE exam. I applied to grad programs literally all over the world! I was crazy determined to pursue my passion at a reputable institution. I lost count of how many applications I put together. I eventually found a home at Tufts University. I am very thankful that they believed in me and gave me a shot. It truly has been great. I went on to get a Master of Science in Computer Science.

The high point of my computer science journey was working as a Software Engineer at Microsoft. Being privileged to work for a tech giant boosted my confidence. It helped me further believe that I was not a fraud. I really did hack my way into computer science. I always felt I was not good enough because of my background and where I grew up. As such, I worked twice as hard as everyone else to fill my knowledge gaps and to prove that I belonged. Now, I don’t stress out as much because I believe in myself and my abilities. I am glad that I persisted in pursuing my passion despite all the challenges of living in the third world. It has been a roller coaster ride. I am now venturing into entrepreneurship where I am facing a whole new world. But it’s exciting! I worked hard before and I succeeded. I am going to work just as hard again and conquer the next set of challenges that come my way.

Additional Useful Reading:

Tell the negative committee to shut up 

Melanin Genius Spark is All Around

Featured Image by LL Twistiti titled “Ride On Towards the Sun” on Flickr | Some rights reserved

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The CS Media Lab is a Boston-anchored civic science news collective with local, national and global coverage on TV, digital print, and radio through CivicSciTV, CivicSciTimes, and CivicSciRadio. Programs include Questions of the Day, Changemakers, QuickTake, Consider This Next, Stories in Science, Sai Resident Collective and more.

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