I am a constant mind-changer. When I originally pitched my idea for the blog this week, I said I’d be writing about my decision to get the BSA degree instead of the BS. Now I’m not so sure.

I let myself feel really bad about this sometimes. I’ve thought if I had just stuck with my ice skating lessons in elementary school or piano in junior high maybe I’d be in the Olympics or Carnegie Hall by now. When I started high school, I had this crazy plan to graduate a year early while taking enough dual enrollment classes to complete my undergrad in two years. If I’d stuck with that I would have been done with college by now (I’m so glad I didn’t).

On the other hand, all of these crazy ideas I’ve woken up with each morning are what have inspired me and gotten me to where I am now. Any plan I made would have required a lot of hard work, and that’s the case with pretty much anything that we chose to do intentionally.

The problem is, this shifting of interests makes me feel like I’ve wasted a lot of time. I think I’m like a lot of people in that I’ve tried to pick up a programming language because of something I wanted to do with it and then stopped before I really accomplished anything significant because I changed my mind. I could have been learning something I would actually use. I don’t regret it though, because just learning more about different languages and aspects of computer science makes you a more knowledgeable programmer, and you’ll have a head start if you ever decide to pick up a project with that language again.

Of course, there’s definitely an art to knowing how much switching is okay and how much will just take you in circles. You have to really know the difference between changing your mind because what you’re doing isn’t really what you wanted, and changing your mind just because you’re not sure what you want and you think that maybe you’ll just stumble across it in some other random corner of the universe if you do something different.

I think the best approach is to identify the general direction you want to go in, and then just knock out the stuff that you’d have to do no matter what in this direction (although going down some paths you’re not completely sure about along the way isn’t always bad, so long as you keep up with the more general stuff as well). This way, you can minimize wasted effort, and actually accomplish things even though you may not know what they will really be while you’re working towards them. As far as the BSA/BS situation, I’ve still been making progress on either degree, so it’s not a big deal which I choose until another year or so from now, at which point I’ll have a much better idea of what’s better for me anyways.

So anyways, the only concrete plan I have right now is to keep working hard and moving forward. And of course, to appreciate the heck out of everyone who’s been so patient with me throughout all of the different plans I make.