| First, I felt similar to you, but working felt much different because work was accomplishing something while class felt like it wasn't doing anything. The context and the meaning was everything. Doing new hire interviews, I promise you that many candidates interview worse than you. I started work with very low confidence, but interviewing other candidates vastly boosted my confidence. If you can conjure up BFS/DFS on demand, you are already in the top 50% of new grads. If you can do recursive backtracking easily, you're probably in the top 10%. Dynamic programming? Probably the top 1%. If you feel your anxiety is too much, I would try to find a therapist. Forcing yourself to do something you hate will burn you out and potentially cripple your life. Maybe your problem is simple, like poor sleep, poor diet, or not enough exercise. Maybe your problem is complex like feeling nobody would love you, which definitely puts a damper on work that isn't very gratifying in the near term, since what's the point in investing in yourself if you're unlovable anyway? Procrastinating work -> high stress deadlines -> poor sleep -> less ability to focus -> more procrastination -> more stress is an absolutely damaging cycle, and certainly the type of thing that is worth getting external help with. If you game or scroll reddit for hours, you are almost certainly giving yourself a dopamine based dysfunction of some sort and probably need to think about how to curb that behavior. My general opinion is that if negative emotions are strong enough to ask a public forum for help managing them, it's probably wise to see if a therapist can help. If the idea of seeking mental help is off putting, I think it's important to think about physical therapy. There is a movement called a hip hinge, it means bending with your glutes. Some people when told to bend over, will instinctively bend their back, not hinge with their glutes. A therapist can show you how to move with your hips rather than with your back. Before seeing a therapist, you don't even know your body is moving incorrectly, much less how to fix it. Would you judge yourself for the physical therapist teaching you how to bend over properly? |
Thanks, this is a message I have seen repeated around here and it changed my view towards the internship.
>Doing new hire interviews, I promise you that many candidates interview worse than you. I started work with very low confidence, but interviewing other candidates vastly boosted my confidence. If you can conjure up BFS/DFS on demand, you are already in the top 50% of new grads. If you can do recursive backtracking easily, you're probably in the top 10%. Dynamic programming? Probably the top 1%.
Thanks for the info, as I am turning to some old Data Structures classes and that problem solving seems refreshing.
>Procrastinating work -> high stress deadlines -> poor sleep -> less ability to focus -> more procrastination -> more stress is an absolutely damaging cycle, and certainly the type of thing that is worth getting external help with.
This is something I feel, I am just stuck on a rather hard position where I am living in Germany (with a mediocre German level) and seeking a therapist is hard in my position, I am trying to do some tele-consultation in French. Altho I will seek IRL therapy as soon as I can.
Thanks for writing the message.