BEFORE STANFORD, I'd never heard the term "CS." When my pre-Orientation mates used it repeatedly during our technology-free week of hiking in Yosemite prior to the start of freshman year, I had to ask them what it stood for. But their matter-of-fact response—"computer science"—was still a foreign concept to me. It took a good bit of one morning's trek and quite a few drawings in the dirt before I was able to wrap my head around the behind-the-scenes workings of Microsoft Word and Safari.
Now, as a senior, much has changed: My major, symbolic systems, requires classes in CS, and I am proud to say I've made it through them alive. I no longer imagine removing flies from a flytrap when someone says "debugging." I have learned how important a single semicolon can be; those darn things are mighty—and mighty cumbersome.
I never expected to be waking up in the middle of the night with indecipherable dreams that took place in C++—the product of a brain on overdrive with new information—and I can't say I have found that experience particularly enjoyable. (Note: Counting opened and closed parentheses is not as relaxing as counting sheep.) Nonetheless, I celebrate my decision to develop my technical side. Although it does not come naturally to me, in Bay Area culture, knowing how to code feels like a prerequisite to existing. When I introduce myself as a "sym syser" to fellow students and local professionals, the smiles are warmer and the conversations more respectful than when I mention only my French degree and/or my communication co-term. This phenomenon often makes me wonder: Is being tech-savvy becoming synonymous with being seen as a worthy human?
During the summer prior to my matriculation at Stanford, I lived and worked on a sustainable organic farm in a rural Michigan town too small to have its own grocery store. My cell phone had no service for the last 6 miles of the unpaved roads leading to the fields. The most technology I encountered was the owner's tractor—which he used only if we farm helpers hadn't done a thorough enough job tilling the soil around the potatoes and onions by hand.
Admittedly, some days I felt a little too far away, perhaps nostalgic for the washing machine and warm shower of my parents' home in suburban Washington, D.C. But my time on the farm was so much more than an endurable adventure characterized by a landscape of tech desolation. I rose with the sun rather than to the raucous chiming of my iPhone alarm. I poached my morning eggs till I was too hungry to wait any longer; who needs a digital egg timer, anyway? Out in the fields of kale, arugula and kohlrabi, I smiled at the peaceful silence and stillness of the earth around me. Thinking, growing and simply being in this natural oasis, I felt serene, balanced and connected.
Not long afterward, I arrived on the Farm. It didn't take me long to realize a different kind of connectedness was the norm. I reeled with culture shock at the incessant buzz of wireless devices and code-heavy discussions around me. I quickly learned through get-to-know-you conversations that being a "techie" was inherently cooler than being a "fuzzie," and that social standard plus rumors of superior job prospects for engineers began to make me question my plan to major in psychology.
Three years later, here I am, close to graduating and capable of coding. Now what?
I certainly don't imagine myself thriving as a professional programmer, because thinking in syntactically flawless computer-speak remains a wearisome process for me. But I have found that the foundational CS technique of decomposing a problem into various manageable subproblems (and then resolving each of those individually) has boundless applications well beyond the technical realm. In a sense, I guess you could say CS taught me how to think. It reinforced for me that, when the going gets tough, the answer is often to reframe the problem.
It also encouraged me to question, to think beyond others' solutions and chart my own way. Right now, among Silicon Valley inhabitants, at least, the general opinion appears to be that technology is paramount; the solution to anything seems to require a programmer to implement. Instead of being swept up in the Bay Area tech frenzy, I feel like an edge case, a skeptic unwilling to consider programming ability on par with Divinity. I want us to remember that for all the power of technology, we are human without it.
Former Stanford intern Marisa Messina, '16, has completed her undergraduate degrees in symbolic systems and French. She is finishing up her senior year and her MA in communication, and would like to pursue a career combining her interests in psychology and technology—but not too much of the latter.
