I’m Nikhil Gautam, from a physics background. I had no technical experience at all, so learning programming at the beginning felt honestly overwhelming.
I still remember my very first day in college. We had a computer lab session, which already felt strange because I was pursuing physics. I sat on one of the desktops while the teacher started introducing Python (still don’t know who starts teaching by directly jumping into a language). I didn’t understand a single thing, but I kept nodding like I totally did.
Then the teacher said, “Open the terminal.”
I had absolutely no idea what that even meant.
Luckily, a friend sitting next to me had some programming experience from high school. So I quietly watched him and copied everything he did. He right-clicked, opened the terminal, and suddenly a black window appeared. Magic.
Our lab machines were running Linux (I still don’t know why), and the teacher started giving commands. I copied them from my friend’s screen, but instantly ran into errors. Python indentation errors, to be exact. They still bother me sometimes.
Out of embarrassment, I closed the terminal and reopened it, thinking that would somehow fix everything. It didn’t.
At one point, my entire terminal output turned red. I panicked and used the same solution again: close it, reopen it, and pretend nothing happened.
The lecture was two hours long. After fighting with the terminal for most of that time, I finally asked my friend what was actually going on. He explained something, but honestly, I didn’t understand a word. I just went with the flow.
At the end of the class, the teacher told us to run all the commands discussed and submit a worksheet with screenshots. For weeks, I copied from my classmates and submitted it.
Then came the viva and report submission day.
That’s when reality hit.
I didn’t know any code.
To be continued…