Last summer I was still very new to the concept of coding, mostly because it was not offered at my high school. I had already taken a college course here, at the University of Illinois Urbana- Champaign, on programming with MATLAB. I received an A in the course but mostly because a friend of mine helped me through the class (Thank you, Nishad). I did not feel satisfied by the level that I was at by the end of the school year and so after talking other students and professors, it was recommended that I try learning code online. The site was highly recommended to me was Codecademy, I immediately signed up but I concede that I had my doubts that I could actually teach myself to code in a new language over the course of a summer. Codecademy offers several languages such as Javascript, Ruby and HTML. After doing some research online I decided that Python was the best language for me to begin learning. The Codecademy Python course is listed as a 13-hour long course and I had 3 months to learn the language. Slowly, but surely as I went through each lesson I felt more comfortable in the mystic realm that is coding. I began to think to myself, 'Anyone can teach themselves to code with enough interest', and I believe this to be true. Learning Python on my own helped me significantly in my sophomore year and made me love coding. Not only has it been a fun experience for me it has opened opportunities for me. Fast forward to my next summer and I am now writing code for research in the very language I knew nothing about a year ago. It is only now that I understand an adage my dad has reiterated to me: "No Knowledge is Lost".
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