I’m at the end of my first year of university in the bachelor of computing science, so here are a few of my tips for 1st year computing science majors (or people who are wanting to learn programming even), some I would like to have heard before starting university.

1 | No, you don’t need to have any knowledge about programming before your classes. I always thought you needed to have at least completed a beginner’s course in codecademy to understand my first year classes, but that’s complete utter bullshit. Sure, it’d probably help to have some prior experience with programming (in any language really, just to get your feet wet), but you’re going to university for the sole purpose of learning. So don’t worry about being behind before you even started, but if you have time, it won’t hurt to learn a little bit.
2 | Theory is important. I really don’t know if this is a common thought that some programmers have, but I’ve had a few classmates disagree with me when I say that reading the textbooks and understanding the concepts is really important. They argue that they can learn better by trial and error, experimenting. And yes, that is also something you should do, try to figure things out yourself, but learning the concepts will save you a lot of time and headache.
3 | There is no shame in looking up a few lines of code online, but make sure you understand it. Before I say anything, I want to make clear that what I am talking about is not plagiarizing someone else’s work, even if it is publicly displayed on the internet: it’s unethical and defeats the purpose of learning. What I mean is, yes, we all look up at StackOverflow a function that fits what we’re trying to do, I used to do that with for-loops when I first learned them, but always read through those lines of code and try to understand what is going on, how does it do the thing it does y’know?
4 | Practice, practice, practice. Like any other skill, the only way to properly learn and become really good at coding is by… coding. So besides your assignments at university, seek out for other exercises or challenges online and try them out. Or you can even come up with something yourself! Write literally anything that comes on your mind, which will become easier to think about every time you learn something new in class.
5 | Don’t let others intimidate you. This was probably my biggest problem in the first few weeks of uni: almost all of my classmates already had quite an extensive knowledge of programming. That is not uncommon, as a lot of people decide to go into CS after trying out a bit of programming in their teen years. But that does not mean they’re better than you or that you will never get as good as them. It all depends on you and the effort you will put into programming.
6 | Go to the labs!!!!!!! I swear, if you have labs and don’t go to them, you’re basically boycotting yourself. Professors help so much during the labs, even if they’re not helping you specifically. Even if the lab is not for an assignment in particular, you can always bring your own personal little projects or even ask that one thing you’re not 100% sure you got that takes like a minute to answer.
7 | Don’t try to learn every single thing at once. If you have little to no knowledge of programming, like I did in my first semester, you may find yourself hung up on a few things. For example, first thing that I learned in my Java class was the System.out.println statement. Along with it, my professor put it inside a method that went like this: public static void main(String[] args). Despite my professor telling us we would learn all about it later in the class, my brain was just going “what? why is it public. what do you mean void?????? wtf is args”. Truth is, I didn’t need to learn that at first, and if I tried to it’d probably be worse than not knowing, since I wasn’t prepared to learn something like that. So don’t rush things, you will learn it sooner or later.

This was way longer than I expected, but I hope it helps someone! I didn’t do much planning before writing it and I did everything on the go, so I’m sorry if a few things are not really concise.
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