Matthew Palmer wrote:
On Sat, Feb 19, 2005 at 09:11:14PM +0000, Helen Faulkner wrote:I wonder how many other people here experienced a similar thing to what the woman interviewed relates: namely that the apparent level of programming expertise of the men in her course, before the course even started, was so high that she felt incompetant by comparison and was discouraged from pursuing it further.Having taught CSCI courses, and been quite interested in the level of competence in my fellow students in my EE subjects, I observed that most people, regardless of gender, had absolutely no knowledge, experience, or aptitude for programming. Yes, some people could already program (such as myself), but there are always going to be a few people with prior experience in any field of study. But perhaps my University just attracted a lot of really dumb and ill-suited CSCI candidates. It certainly is inappropriate for a course to have "implied pre-requisites", whatever they may be, and the institution should typically have a means of attaining any explicit pre-requisites which are not obtained via the usual means of entry (that means high school, for the most part). But getting discouraged because other people are better than you is setting yourself up for failure wherever you go. Only one person can be at the top of any field. Everyone else is a runner-up.
I doubt that your university was very different to mine, to be honest. And probably "programming expertise" is not really what I mean, though it is certainy a subset of it.
What I remember about hitting first years elec engineering at Melbourne university in 1993 was having to learn about and deal with the following types of things, for the first time ever :
- a multi-user computing environment - using a command line interface - unix in general - the conceptual basics of programming - the internet and email such as existed at that stageI struggled with all of that stuff (and I'm not particularly stupid). In retrospect I didn't even understand it even when I passed the subjects. And one of the things I remember noticing, and discussing with other women in my course, was that so many of the men in that course had spent the last few years playing with their computers at home, that they had the advantage of having encountered most of those concepts before even starting the course.
This is not "getting discouraged because other people are better than you are". It is, rather, getting discouraged because most of the people you are competing with have years of background, for whatever reason, that you lack.
I'm not suggesting that getting discouraged in that way was a good response. Only that it was a very common response among the women I was studying with. And that I am interested in knowing who has had similar experiences to that.
Helen