I have never been overly proficient in computers or technology of really any kind. I, however, have never run into any serious problems with computer or technology to challenge my knowledge. This class, while not a serious problem, has me doing things with my computer that I have never really done nor thought could be done. I always understood what coding was and that there are different ways to do so–I knew there was HTML and I had heard of python and mathematica, but I had never truly used these systems before. In fact, I had mostly been afraid of them. The ideas of algebra seemed complicated to me and so how was I supposed to figure out the language of computers? Since computers stem from mathematics and algorithms, I did not think I would have been capable of understanding them. Then, I started my internship.
In the Fall semester of 2018, I started a library instruction internship where I began to learn how to be a research librarian. While most of librarianship is understanding how to use databases, there is also a whole sector of creating webpages, websites, databases, and more. While most of the moderators make it easy to use the site, sometimes I had to go into the HTML to make things look exactly how I want and so I had to stop being afraid of coding. I realized a lot of coding is less knowing the specific parts of the language itself, but knowing how those parts work together. The more I played around with HTML, the more comfortable I got with it–I am no master of coding, but I do have a strong confidence in being able to learn how to use certain methods.
I decided to take this class to learn a little more about how to control a computer as I want to go into the field of librarianship and research–and as we know, humanities is becoming more and more digital, and as an English major I want to be able to keep up with different forms of presenting, analyzing, and creating literature and/or texts. What this class has taught me the most so far: how to follow steps.
There have been some classes that I have fallen so behind in that I start becoming frazzled and annoyed. Instead of letting myself spiral, I would start from the beginning and just slowly work my way through each step until I got to the problem area. Sometimes, there would just be no problem anymore. Other times, I would have to fish around different parts of my computer to find a setting or button to change. While the confusion is aggravating, it also has allowed me to become more and more familiar with what is on my computer and in my system settings. I think another part to feeling comfortable in any discipline is knowing the foundation–and the foundation here would be just understanding the basics of a computer. The more I get to understand the anatomy of my device, the more confident I am in handling any issues that may come up and therefore the more confident I am in my computer skills.