This article is for both techies who want to share a laugh about hardships that undoubtedly come with the life path and anyone who is more interested in the mysterious discipline of computer science. I've found that a lot of people think that there is a lot more magic and complicatedness to CS than I have found in my time within the discipline. Also, the greatest part about CS is the community, so hopefully some CSers can have a good laugh with this!

1. I'm having a CS stack overflow, there are infinite recursions of assignments.

When your computer runs a program, it puts all of the lines of code that make up the program onto something called the stack. Then, it runs the program step by step through the commands in the order of that stack. But if you have an infinite number of things being put onto the stack, it causes an error known as a stack overflow. So when professors give too many assignments, a CS student may also experience a stack overflow!

2. If there's one thing that robotics has taught me, it's that there's no such thing as impossible.

Sometimes your professor gives you an assignment and you think to yourself, oh, that's lovely. I wish I had the skills to do that. Then you spend countless hours over the week on Google, trying to piece together at least a C when you learn that anything is possible in CS!

3. CS is like magic: You can cast, invoke, call, and create things out of little bursts of energy.

Although these terms mean something much different in CS, it still feels like magic when you figure out how to use them. Casting is a magical principle that allows you some wiggle room with data types. When you use a function/method in CS, it's considered a call or invocation. Also, the little bursts of energy in the computer chip are responsible for turning the code into a runnable program.

4. "You can't get a latte, girl. Remember what happened last time. Friends don't let friends drink lattes." --Yavneeka Patel

Caffeine is often a great device for helping one stay up. However, you have to make sure that you can handle it. In other words, can you code while you're vibrating like an electron in a solar panel?

5. "My presentation is going to be me up there saying, 'Yo, I tried.'" --Yavneeka Patel

CS projects always involve big dreams, but not necessarily actualization. Unfortunately, a lot of time they do culminate in a final presentation of your progress from the semester. As that presentation date nears and it becomes apparent that the final product is not exactly industry standard, you have to hope that the good ol' college try will be enough to save your grade.

6. "The quadcopter is like a metaphor for our projects. I thought it was going to be easy and it wasn't." --Grace Yoo, Grace Barkhuff, Yavneeka Patel.

If you've ever attempted to fly a quadcopter, you know that it is a lot harder than they make it look in those viral videos. You have to control so many things at once or else the whole thing goes straight down. My fellow students and I have found this to be an excellent metaphor for a robotics project. The design seems so simple, but one unforeseen factor can bring the whole thing crashing down!