I absolutely love maths and computers, but the deeper I go into these courses I grow more tired and more frustrated at my own attempts to learn. The difficulty just ramps up harder and harder, I never get a good foothold on the material, and I'm just lost in claiming I love the subject but dreading every time that claim is put to the test.
I found myself in a very similar place at the end of my first year in college. I was studying Computer Science and taking a lot of mathematics and physics courses, as well as programming. I loved mathematics in high school, and was very good at it - I was one question shy of a perfect SAT score - and I had done a fair amount of web development and scripting as well, in my free time. I figured that I'd do well with more of the same, and that I'd enjoy being a software developer once I graduated.
It took me that whole first year to realize that I'd fall out of love with all of these things were I expected to do them for 40+ hours a week, every week, as my career. I was already falling out of love with them as a student! Some things weren't challenging at all, some things were far too challenging given how dry I thought they were, and almost everything I did was so hypothetical and rudimentary and disconnected from anything else. It felt meaningless, I felt as if what I was learning and what I could do at that point didn't really matter all that much. It was uncomfortable, to say the least.
So I sat down and thought about why I enjoyed what I did, when I did, and I realized that while I did find fun in development and mathematics as a hobby, it wasn't my
passion. Indeed, what made me excited about all those programming projects I did as a hobby wasn't the programming itself, but rather the operational outcome of the things I created.
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As an example - during my sophomore year, my school collaborated with a security camera company called AXIS Communications, whereby the company provided free hardware and guidance in order to entice students to create apps for their fledgling "smart camera" app platform. I was encouraged by a few professors to participate in the collaboration, but I wasn't at all interested (especially since I had never done computer-vision-related work, and knew it to be complicated and
really hard to do)... Until I realized that I could use the camera and some software projects/libraries to build a solution to a big problem I had - namely, that of folks not signing in when entering a radio studio that I ran.
Over the course of six weeks or so, I ended up building a facial detection/tracking solution that would create a visitor log and send alerts when it didn't recognize someone. It was an alpha program, and I never got around to refining or finishing it, but it was really exhilarating to have an insight, prototype the solution, and then install it and actually begin using it. I was eventually invited to demo the project at a conference, and the whole collaboration was ultimately really fulfilling.
Here's the thing, though - the actual coding experience wasn't fun at all! Coding, debugging, coding some more, debugging even more issues, debugging hardware issues, trolling Stack Exchange to figure out why the heck these exceptions were thrown when compiling to ARM... it was an experience that led to many restless nights, GrubHub orders and head-desk moments. Those middle four weeks sucked, plainly put.
However, I'm so thankful I did that project, because it made it abundantly clear what to me what I did and didn't enjoy. Grinding to convert caffeine into code wasn't fun at all, but identifying a problem and knowing how technology can fix it
was. As was working with users, giving feedback to AXIS, prototyping solutions, thinking about interfaces... I was studying to become an engineer who sometimes works with people, when in reality I wanted to work with people and sometimes engineer.
For me, technology isn't the thing; it's the thing that gets us to the thing. I love technology as a tool that can be leveraged to improve lives. But just as a carpenter wouldn't fancy forging their tools themselves, my focus is in building the businesses and ideas and solutions and environments and infrastructure that technology make possible. Where I am most invested in is the intersection of technology and humanity.
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All of this to say that while I understand full well how you must be feeling right now, I'd encourage you to give yourself the experiences and perspective to better understand what kind of work is the greatest source of joy for you. It might take a lot of hard work to get there, but once you know, you know.
