First days as Computer Engineering Student

friends used to talk about using ‘SDL’ and graphics, making games and stuffs, when I was just learning about ‘for loops’ and ‘if conditions’

It was the first year of my engineering studies when I used to stay on my college’s hostel with friends. I joined the college because I wanted to know about computers, my love since I was a little child. Those days were wonderful, but sometimes quite frustrating. Wonderful because I got to learn new concepts and ideas in computer programming. And frustrating because friends used to talk about using ‘SDL’ and graphics, making games and stuffs, when I was just learning about ‘for loops’ and ‘if conditions’. Of course, that was some initial days of first year.

No matter how much fun I used to have with friends and studying, I must say, initial days were quite hard for me. There used to be some technical terms which were so confusing to me. I really could not get the exact meaning of what those meant. One of them was ‘console’. Oh my god!! What in the whole world did that mean??

“I made a game and it runs in console.” some used to say.

“Oh, did you do that in console??” others used to react (Probably they knew what it meant).

And I used to smile, saying to myself “Boy, you need to work really hard, just to be able to converse well with the guys”. Oh Console!!.

Then comes another conversation, which happened in hostel during first year. “What are you doing today?” I asked a friend, who still is among my bests. “I think I’ll code today. Need to code so much.” he replied.

‘Coding’ sounded quite an advanced term. At least for me. I used to wonder what he would be doing when he was “coding”.

This used to go on in my mind, “I don’t ‘code’. I just try to write programs to sort elements in array or something very trivial. I don’t think what I do is called ‘coding’. It’s just sorting elements.”

Even though many things went on in my mind out of my curiosity and the peculiarity of the word ‘coding’, I again used to smile and say, “That’s cool yaar. I think I’ll do the same.”

Four years have passed since those moments. It feels good remembering them and that always puts smile on my face.

And the important thing is that now I think I know what those terms meant then.