CS50x for people who don’t study or work in programming - honest opinion
Hi guys! I’m 19 and currently about to start the final year of my undergraduate degree in Languages and International Relations. Despite having nothing to do with my field of study, starting CS50x this summer was genuinely one of the best decisions I’ve made in a long time.
For context: in high school, I took a more science-oriented path (A levels maths, biology, geology, physics, and chemistry) and at one point I was considering medical school. However, I ended up hating maths because, to put it simply, I hated my teacher, and those years were also marked by a severe depression and anorexia. Long story short, I developed a real aversion to anything related to maths and eventually found refuge in languages and history, which influenced my choice of degree.
But don’t get me wrong, I don’t regret my degree at all.I now speak four languages and spend my time studying economics, law, geopolitics… all of which I love. But as I’m approaching my final year, I’ve started to feel that my course no longer challenges me in the way I need. I felt like I had become too intellectually comfortable and stuck.
That’s what pushed me to start CS50x this summer.
I’m only in week 2, so obviously I can’t speak to long-term outcomes yet, but I can already say it has had a surprisingly strong impact on me. Here are some of the changes I’ve noticed so far:
1. My logical thinking improved - not only while coding I’ve started noticing patterns in a way I genuinely hadn’t before.
2. It changed the way I understand languages - shocking, I know but programming forces you to think in terms of structure, syntax, and logic, I feel like I now pick up grammatical and syntactic similarities between the languages I speak much faster.
3. My problem-solving skills improved - especially in the economics research paper I’m currently working on.
4. My confidence improved a lot - I’ve never thought of myself as dumb, but I did feel restricted and watching myself solve problems that once felt impossible has been rewarding.
6. It helped my memory - coding helps me build stronger mental connections between concepts.
7. It has taught me persistence in a way my degree rarely does - my field, a lot of the “problem-solving” we do as undergraduates doesn’t really involve sitting with one hard problem for hours and with CS50x, I’ve had to sit with problems much longer than I’m used to in order to find a solution.
So if anyone entered this subreddit thinking, “This has nothing to do with what I study or what I want to do professionally, but I still find it interesting” I’d say: do it!
Even if you never become a programmer, I think learning computer science can change the way you think. At least for me, it has already made me more analytical, more patient, more confident, and more curious. I believe that staying inside one academic lane for too long makes your thinking narrower without you even noticing, and going into something completely different can be one of the best ways to challenge that.
PS: Guys, tell me why I have written papers with less passion than this lol, I swear this isn’t an ad.
Edit: typos, ops.