My First Challenge at University

How University is shaping and shifting my identity

Auckland Botanic Gardens

Last Tuesday and the following Friday evening, I spent hours, with no success, working on an assignment for my communication course. The communication course, Digital Communication and Practice, has JavaScript coding in it. The assignment was to write a code for palindrome words, where the word can be read the same as forward and backward like “level and madam”. This level of coding came on top of the three weeks of coding lessons we had so far. I certainly had not developed the necessary knowledge to write the palindrome code. Dozens of questions were popping up from every line of the coding instruction, I did not know any answer to. I was frustrated. Never in my life had I felt this incompetence in learning. I’ve always been good at learning. That is the Hussain I knew. It clouded my whole perception of myself.

As a human we tend to perceive part as a whole—perhaps evolutionarily to maximize our interaction with the particular. For example, when you are inside a forest you don’t see a forest you see trees around you. You only see a forest if you are outside of the forest or have a map of it. The question is which one is real the forest or the trees? Both are real. Depending on your different levels of interaction, you treat one more real than the other—assigning them a distinct hierarchy of meaning. If you want to get out of the forest you need to get through the trees first. No matter how much knowledge you have about the forest as a whole if you cannot get through the trees in front of you, you cannot get out of the forest. This analogy may or may not help to understand what I am trying to say, but we all relate to generalizing things in our lives.

I was questioning my overall competence as a learner. Was I a slow learner? I even partly queried why I was at university—was it a mistake to choose to study? Did I deserve to be at university? It was even overriding my ability to write. At that moment, I didn’t see myself as a writer. I know that none of them is true. I am often a quick learner. Sometimes I might need to change my approach to fit the learning material. And it wasn’t a mistake to choose to study. Like many students, I have the necessary competence to succeed in my studies—I do quite well in my three other courses.

I think it’s important to always see the part in relation to a whole rather than as a whole—to see trees as part of a forest even if you don’t see the forest at the given moment. Articulation is an important process to draw that connection. We have access to some amazing tools like talking, thinking, and writing to articulate.

An important part of questioning my competency was to change my approach. That’s what I always used in the face of challenges in Indonesia. In the context of learning how to code, it meant whatever previous knowledge I held was not helping and I needed to change my approach from philosophical thinking to computation thinking. Throughout my life, I was used to thinking to a looser end with multiple forms of interpretation holding the same truth. Computation thinking is based on logic where each step matters and builds on top of each other. With any changes, that realization came with an unpleasant experience, which is always forgiven for what it brings.

Please continue sending your likes through the little heart button at the bottom left corner of the post. If email is not allowing you to send your like, please open the post through the Substack web page or mobile application. Many thanks for this extra effort!