On being outgunned by the comp sci cohort
14 min read
The feeling arrives in the first week, usually in a lab session: everyone else seems to already speak the language, and you are translating every sentence before you can respond to it.
What is actually happening
Most of what feels like a knowledge gap is a vocabulary gap, and vocabulary closes fast. You will learn what a foreign key is in an afternoon. You will not learn, in an afternoon, what a discharge summary needs to actually communicate to the next clinician who reads it under time pressure. That took years, and it is still yours.
Where the gap is real, and where it is not
The gap is real in raw coding fluency for the first two terms. It is not real in judgement about which problems are worth solving, and it is not real in understanding what "done" means for a system that touches patient care. Those are the parts that decide whether a project succeeds, and they do not correlate with how fast someone writes a for loop.
The part nobody tells you
The gap closes faster than the anxiety about the gap does. Most students find that by the second year, the conversation has quietly inverted: the comp sci cohort is asking them what actually happens on a unit at 3am, because that is the part the syllabus never covered, and it turns out to matter more than anyone let on.