Dear Future Student of DS106,

Congratulations on making a great decision! This class is literally DA BOMB, and probably my favorite that I’ve taken at Mary Wash thus far.

Get ready for a lot of time-consuming work. You’ll get an assignment, think, “oh SWEET, this will be awesome,” then spend the next two days on it until you’re finished because you get so wrapped up in it.  Get ready to also be frustrated. If you’re like me, and know almost zero about computers, you’ll feel this way a lot. But, once you finish a difficult assignment that took awhile, you’ll feel crazy accomplished.

I promise you’ll learn a lot in this class, and you’ll really have to dig deep sometimes to come up with something creative, but it’ll be a ton of fun.  You’ll learn a lot about your classmates, and you get tons of opportunities to show everyone your interests.  The best part of this class is that once you get an assignment, you really have a lot of options as to how to go about it.  You’re not stuck with lots of specifics, so you’re really able to make the assignments match up with your interests.

Also,  JimGroom is one of the most patient professors I’ve ever had. There were multiple times when he could have said, “are you kidding?! DUH.” or, “figure it out on your own” or even, “I don’t have time for this,” but he ALWAYS is ready to help, even for the most trivial things.  I swear he tweets more than any celebrity out there, and you’ll get a response 20 times faster from him via Twitter than if you e-mail him. He’s also always willing to meet up with students face-to-face to help them out with any problems they’re having on assignments.  Basically, he’s awesome.

All in all, you’ll really have a great time in this class. Yeah, you’ll get angry sometimes when your computer doesn’t do exactly what you want it to, but don’t worry about it! Everyone will have trouble, but you’ll also be able to learn from all the mistakes you made.

Sincerely,

A former DS106er