Lately, while embracing my senior year, I’ve been thinking about my first year at Pomona College. Two vivid memories come to mind. First, I fondly remember befriending six seniors. Second, I remember developing a love-hate relationship with Pomona’s introductory computer science class, CS 051.
The first memory brings me back to time spent with these six seniors: laughing with them, learning from them and listening to them talk (and sometimes rant and cry) about their senior theses.
I remember that my first-year self was always in awe of my friends talking about their chemistry, neuroscience and public policy analysis projects. Even when they were complaining about their theses, their intelligence made me think, “Am I really going to be able to pull off a whole thesis in four years?”
CS 051 was required for my cognitive science major and was also my first exposure to computer science. The difficulty of the course material overwhelmed me. I remember dreading my Monday evening CS lab in the spring, wanting to bang my head against the wall when a single problem took me the entire three-hour time block.
At the same time, I also remember using what I had learned in class to build my own Korean drama recommender in Python. I hated my lab and yet sometimes coded for fun; it was a love-hate relationship indeed. Still, after finishing my first year, I remember hoping that I would never have to code for a class again.
Four years have gone by quickly, and now, in my senior year, I am working my way through my own cognitive science thesis. Perhaps ironically, for this thesis, I am knee-deep in Python code again.
“The first memory brings me back to time spent with these six seniors: laughing with them, learning from them and listening to them talk (and sometimes rant and cry) about their senior theses.“
Though the last time I opened a Python file was during that fateful first-year spring, my thesis has required me to reimmerse myself in the world of while loops, if statements and frightful indentation errors. In order to build my experimental task, I’ve had to re-engage my debugging skills that have lain dormant for seven semesters.
Honestly, when I’m sitting in front of PsychoPy with code that won’t run, I heavily relate to my senior friends who have since graduated. Like they did with me in my freshman year, sometimes all I want to do is rant or cry to my friends about this damn thesis.
So, I have made silly efforts to romanticize my thesis process this semester — with one such effort being sometimes pairing my PsychoPy screen with a nice glass of wine. I put on my headphones, quietly let my favorite music fill my ears, and as I write a line of code, sip. As I debug, sip. As I cross my fingers and run my code, sip. As I disheartenedly discover that the program still doesn’t do what I want, big sip.
The wine is not nearly enough to interfere with my ability to write code (though my coding skills are already weak to begin with), but rather, it romanticizes my working ambience. The image itself is also rather funny — me spending my Saturday night in front of my Python code, Dear Evan Hansen’s “For Forever” sweetly permeating my ears and a glass of wine in hand.
I’ve come to realize that there are some weekends like this that call for an evening of studying, homework and work — especially when you feel stressed about your thesis like me — but that doesn’t mean that the time has to be completely dull. Sometimes, a fun little beverage (note: any little beverage) can add a little sparkle to the ambience and your mood.
Writing my thesis is still daunting to me. Thinking further into the spring, I am stressed about how I am going to test all of my participants in time, analyze the data and write the whole paper. I’d much rather write a big English paper than a big cognitive science paper, but I also know deep down that I will make it through and that all of us cognitive science seniors will make it through.
I also know that years from now, I’ll probably laugh at the thought of college-me coding away while drinking chardonnay.
Emily Kim PO ’25 is from Irvine, California. Her current favorite item from her snack hauls is the chocolate churro Turtle Chips, which she believes is the perfect crunchy sweet treat.
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