Studying Computer Engineering in High School
Here is my four-year experience of learning Computer Engineering from grade nine onwards
Little background
It is not just another article criticizing the old syllabus of Computer Engineering, it is a story of a little boy( at least used to be a little boy before starting Computer Engineering). He used to be one of the guys always talking about how bad the school where he is studying is. A frequency of sound "This is my last year in this school, I will find a new school next year" used to buzz around in his friend circle in a time interval of a day. The year finishes and that boy was able to get admission to a public school forty kilometers far from his home. He chose that school just because everyone was talking about it and he liked the buildings of that school. That school had a special course from the ninth standard to the twelfth standard, basically a high school course. The course was Computer Engineering. The boy knew that there is a course of Engineering from ninth grade. But the boy wasn't interested in one thing which is to study engineering. Again, he didn't have any interest in CE. Anyways, he thinks to give it a try.
Freshman year
On the first day of his school, he comes to know that school time isn't normal. It was structured in the cruelest way possible and the subjects were countless, to be exact eleven subjects were there in ninth grade. Immediately he regrets the decision of choosing engineering. Again he thinks to give it try. He returns home and he has already made a friend who lives near to him. After returning from school, they search for the name of the school on Youtube. The properly structured video with a class of the most disciplined students possible appeared at the top of the search result. For almost ten minutes, they watched the extremely terrific side of his newly joined school.
Oh my god! The perfect school. How disciplined students they are? He got some thoughts but after attending classes for a few weeks, he could now feel how much effort the teacher had to put on to make those students look disciplined. Luckily, three of his classmates were there on the video, and little did he comes to know that it was all scripted for a sake of some prizes. It was never the real side of the school. Okay, still he is not in a good school.
At least he now has an internet connection. Noone believes when he tells others that he didn't have any access to the internet before his ninth standard. He was truly a T.V. guy and a boy fond of offline games and never heard of any online games. He probably watched his fifth video on YouTube after getting into nine classes. He watched around four videos before on his sister's phone, somehow he was able to. Now the only thing he does on the phone is watching YouTube. He also created his new YouTube channel and uploaded a video after downloading and trimming a real video from another channel. The boy was happy, his studies were collapsing.
He also gets an experience to see how the internet works on a laptop. Before that, he used the laptop as a great storage device consisting of a huge repository of mobile games and apps. Basically, an offline play store containing several hundred .apk files.
He was already interested in the internet and technology, he got even more curious about programming. He learned only HTML, CSS, a little bit of javascript, and C programming in freshman year. In the middle of the year, he was lucky enough to get into a local programming competition which was a local interschool web development competition. he can't mention the motivation he got from that program in words but he can say one thing more than half of the projects he has done till now were only possible due to that kickstart and the encouragement he got from there. Every three months, students need to build a project and submit it to the teacher. At the end of the year, he was able to present a beautiful website with a little bit of use of PHP without a purpose. Just before fifteen days of their final exam, COVID got the role to play in the story. The exams were scheduled ten days before the original date, and he passed the exams and relaxed on vacation.
Sophomore year
The vacation was extending. He was getting bored watching television and sitting inside of the four walls and continuously listening to the news about the pandemic that is taking the lives of people by storm. Eventually, the classes started. This time he didn't have to put on uniforms or walk for ten minutes. Neither does he need to get bored staring at the blackboard. It was a completely new experience, there were online classes.
After almost 7 months of online classes, the physical classes opened up. All students dressed up and went to school. Started preparing for board exams of tenth standards but just after four months of starting physical classes, the gates of school again closed up due to the second wave of COVID-19. The exams got canceled as the cases were increasing every single day.
Guess who is this idiotic boy about whom I am talking. Yes, it is me. Let me share the rest of my journey from the first person's perspective.
This year I learned C++ and a bit of assembly language in school but I learned more about javascript from informal sources. I opened up a YouTube channel and started uploading quality videos after 20th November 2020. I learned the basics of video editing and youtube studio all in a Lenovo g405 laptop with only 2GB RAM and an extremely unknown AMD processor. And I also started writing blogs on Hashnode. I already had an account but first I used to convert my already published videos on YouTube into text format.
Junior year
At the start of the eleventh standard, I got a new laptop. I was really excited but at the same time, I wasn't excited at all. Excited because I got a new feature-packed laptop, not excited because I got it after the vacation of tenth grade. I missed most of my vacation time without learning anything good, anything new. Keeping that regret aside, I learned various new things like:
- Video editing
- Reactjs
- Node and express
- MongoDB
I realized the importance of having genuine blogs. I was also getting more engagements on blogs that were about how to do this and that. I felt like I am helping someone by writing blogs and got motivated. And yes I am continuously writing to date. And I also became one of the 150 writers to receive August giveaway for writing blogs. This was my first earning outside of my home country. I was really excited to receive $50 for writing the blogs.
Not only that I have participated in various online hackathons organized by Hashnode and Hackereath. I participated in four hackathons and became runner-up in one of them by building a Code typing speed testing platform.
The year got over with loads of procrastination and also a lot of productive time. One thing I am very proud of during my junior year is living alone. While it seems cool to someone but living alone isn't an easy thing and especially when you get sick. Also, I think I was aware of the networking so I started talking with some people having the same interest as me but have already stepped their foot in or had already succeeded in what they wanted to achieve.
Senior year
Oh boy, it's the twelfth grade, and lots of things take place during this year. Currently, I am middle of this year, and let me tell you all of the ups and downs of the 12th class. There is the pressure of board exams, the pressure of selecting a college and course to study for a bachelor and most importantly preparing for an entrance exam. "Preparing for an entrance exam". I literally don't like this sentence and all of the positivity and negativity that comes with this. For real, you have to work your ass off to just get into a college. Wow, what a waste of time in the most beautiful way possible. Can't we do some research or do the things about which we are really interested instead of focusing on a three-hour long exam that examines how powerful the student's memory is?
Yes, I am now able to give my own opinions to people and contribute to the conversation. Mainly this skill has been developed in the last few months. But now I can take decisions on my own, I have my own ideas and my own point of view. I am now able to understand the left wing and the right wing. And I no longer trust one-sided stories. This is not something I got from my school or after pursuing a computer engineering degree.
Recently, I was able to get a lot of badges from Hashnode, and also I participated in June's Linode x Hashnode's hackathon. And I became the winner in this hackathon. Truly an amazing feeling to have. There are a lot of high expectations bars from school and family. Since I live alone, I don't allow anything like this to bother me a lot. Whenever I feel like I cannot put my 100% input into a work that I am interested in, I just step back, relax and get ready for the battlefield again. The year hasn't ended yet, there are probably a lot of ups and downs in a queue. Let's see what's the role of destiny in my life.
Conclusion
From knowing nothing about computers to building some real-world projects, I think learning computer engineering helped me a lot in the journey. I am grateful to all of the people involved directly or indirectly in this journey. Maybe school will end in the next 7-8 months but the memory and experiences I had and will have in high school will last forever. Whether it's going to the same place every year for a picnic or watching youtube videos during online classes or searching on google during online exams, life had to offer a lot of things during these four years. I think I surely had life-changing experiences during these three years but anyone who asks me if it is a good idea to study computer engineering in the same school and in the same circumstances, my answer will probably be no.
It always feels great when I reach the end of writing a blog. I had this much to share but we can stay connected on Twitter for sure. And forgive me for not including any images, I don't have real images and illustrations don't truly depict the emotions.