 My name is Ava. I had no experience with coding before I came to the University of Michigan and now I'm a research assistant in the CSE department. I started with engineering 100 at the University of Michigan. I was in the section that was tasked with building an autonomous drone. We had to program some arduinos and so that started with Python and at first I looked at the lines of code and had no idea what any of it meant but slowly but surely you know after a lot of confusing meetings with my IA's and my professors I started learning more and more about it and it took a lot of time for me to get the foundations of it but it's an experience that was really valuable for me to start learning about CSE. Currently I am a research assistant with the Explore Computer Science Research Program which is for minority students or people who don't have a lot of experience in computer science research. All of the IA's and instructors I've had have been super super helpful. Not just with CSE, even with technical, I've talked to them about imposter syndrome that I've had or feeling kind of behind in my classes and they've always sat down with me and gave me time to go over what was happening. Some advice I'd give for people who aren't new to CSE is to not doubt yourself and realize that you can do it and that taking the opportunities are available for you. I'd be lying if I didn't say there's some days where I have an exam or there's a concept that I have no clue what's going on in it and I sit back and I'm like why did I do this to myself? When I have those moments I sit and remember how far I've come from not knowing anything to where I'm at right now and I kind of reevaluate all the opportunities I have now being in this program and I don't think I'll ever regret choosing CSE.