Week 2 Post 3

Today was one of the hardest days I have had so far. The thing is, I got frustrated over a problem while working on it by myself. What I needed to do was to go over the installation of PyTorch and start with creating my own dataset. At first, I was full of enthusiasm to learn something new and practice my coding skills. However, by the end of the day, I could not help but get frustrated, and it was all because of the difficulties that occurred on my way. As I have just started working on Linux, I consider myself a beginner in using it and do not have much experience with it. Because of my little experience, I had difficulties later on. While trying to install many and many packages and libraries, I had a lot of errors, and some of them I could not solve for almost two hours. After that, I had difficulties executing any code that I wrote because of many other packages that were uninstalled. As well as this, I did not know where to begin in creating my own dataset as I was not given any clear instructions. That situation shattered my enthusiasm and inspiration from the day before and just made me angry. I got angry with myself and felt like I was not good enough to be a research intern in the Robotics lab. Thinking about it now, I realize what I was missing and why my thoughts turned in the opposite direction. I believe that I was missing a teammate or a mentor who could guide me through the process or go over it with me. All the interns were assigned separate tasks to work on by themselves. Personally, I think that such an approach could be improved if we, the interns, were assigned in pairs or teams of three. I believe in pair programming and think that it is easier to learn and get creative when working with other people. It gets pretty frustrating when I do it by myself. However, the other important point that I learned today was to be easier on myself. There is nothing wrong with failing while trying out new things. I now feel better as I had that mental talk about not losing interest and motivation because I have eight more weeks to learn amazing things. Also, I decided to ask Mythra to try out the approach of pair programming as it may increase the efficiency of the interns. Thinking about it made me feel better as I now understand that anger and frustration are much bigger obstacles than failures. Indeed, I learned from failures about what to do and what not to do, whereas such negative emotions only weaken my personality and my motivation, which is unacceptable for me. I promised myself to continue growing as a computer scientist and a person in general by taking the most important lessons throughout my day and using them to become a better version of myself. I am looking forward to using this optimistic approach and am ready for the new challenges on my way.

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