I can’t help it. When I start programming, I get really excited. It doesn’t matter how hard the problem might be in theory; sit me down in front of a computer for a few hours and I’ll solve it. I wrote a master’s project that was supposed to take me 3 months in less than a week. I wrote a classifier that took my group a year of fine-tuning in a single day, and it worked better the first time than theirs did after all of that time. I just whizzed through a programming assignment that my professor admits should take about 9 to 10 hours in a matter of one. I can’t really do this sort of thing if I’m not coding, and I can’t do it at all if I’m under heavy pressure, but if the environment is right, it’s amazing to even me, and perhaps explains why my expectations of myself in other areas are sometimes unreasonable. In some ways, it’s a pity that I don’t get to code more often, because I love doing it and I’m really good at it (having done it since 8).

I need to find fields where I can both code and do research. Representing a problem in code, thus rendering most calculations trivial, just removes ambiguities and minute details that could obstruct the general thought process and just seems to augment my thinking ability. For an ‘N’ type, more general thought processing and fewer details is the optimal situation 🙂