Girl + Computer = ?

It seems like none of my classwork this year will include hours and hours of staying up late finding a way to make my broken code work. This is a godsend. The fact that these days may be behind me is such a huge relief, and a major reward for struggling through the past two years of work.

One of my professors even said today that struggling is part of learning with Computer Science, and that if there’s no struggle then the instinct to correctly interpret something will never come to you.
I may have misjudged the sensitivity of my professors.

So the remaining classes I had yet to experience today were Software Engineering, Web Programming, and Automata Theory.

Web Programming seems like something I’ll be able to pick up pretty quickly. The professor seriously spent most of today discussing HTML - although useful, HTML and CSS are definitely not new subjects to me. This will probably start getting interesting a month from now.

Software Engineering and Automata Theory were the courses I was most apprehensive about. It seems like both of these will be theoretical, discussion-based courses rather than coding-intensive obligations.
Software Engineering will cover the methods and approach to designing software for a customer with a team, rather than the programming of software itself.
Automata Theory sounds like it will consist of no programming, but rather discussion of virtual and theoretical machines and how/if they can compute certain things.
Yeah, I’m still not 100% of that, either. 

Even still, I was surprised at how my Automata Theory professor, Dr. D, interacted with us. His first lecture seemed to include more casual language geared towards students; he even made several strange jokes, much to our enjoyment. He discussed how we needed to make sure we stay sane this semester through our work.
I was probably most touched by something he did at the end of class. Claiming interest in “taking the temperature” of our interest in this unusual subject after our first lecture, he had us write down our opinion of what would be the most challenging about the course and how we felt that moment about it.
I wrote that I was nervous, and that I was worried I’d have a tough time understanding the “big picture” of these concepts and gaining that scholastic instinct he discussed.
Then he had us all fold them up and turn them for him to read later. Points for everyone who turned something in, regardless of what it said.

That was probably one of the most fantastic things my soul has experienced during a CS class - admitting to a professor my major fear of being unable to pick up the subject. Talk about fostering honesty in the classroom.