On a whim, I took a Computer Science (CS) course during my first year at UVA and quickly found out that taking a CS class means having to learn an entirely new, and sometimes difficult, skill: coding. So, when I found out that one of my main responsibilities as a research assistant at the Motivate Lab would be coding, I thought it would be a cool opportunity to transfer my CS skills to the social sciences. It was tough for me to imagine though—why would you need to write software to study educational psychology? Turns out it wasn’t exactly the coding I was used to.
