Ruirui (Annie) Huang

Ruirui (Annie) Huang

she/her/hers

CS + AMS BS & Robotics MSE at JHU. Interests: control & simulation, computational biology, vision models.

Topological sort me into it.

2 minute read

Date:

Intermediate (220) and Data Structures (226)

Table of Contents

Introduction

They always warned us: don’t take Intermediate Programming (IP) and Data Structures (DS) together. They were the two foundational CS requirements, the low-level courses that were supposed to shape you, break you, and maybe both. But me, being a fervent goal-chaser who thought she understood the tricks of the registration system—and noticing that half the upper-level prereqs depended on these two like nodes in a graph—I decided: why not take them both? Surprisingly, both courses went back-to-back on MWF afternoons. Even more surprising? They were taught by the same instructor. First class in the basement, second on the third floor (thankfully, the elevator worked).

The Revisiting

As a former OI-er who quickly dropped the competition grind after moving to a private all-girls school in Maryland (no team, no vibe), I found myself realizing: I actually knew more than I thought. Every lecture felt less like learning something brand-new and more like dusting off old brain-cells. The workload? Not nearly as apocalyptic as people made it out to be. (Re-visited: I even survived without ChatGPT!) I made some very pretty notes—always satisfying—and while I can barely recall how the instructor taught, I do remember that my understanding of the material deepened in a way high-school me would have envied.

Language, or Dialect?

One unexpected revelation: when I used to tell people my “mother tongue” was C++, that wasn’t quite true. For competitions, my dialect was a hybrid of C and C++:

  • Always scanf/printf, almost never cin/cout (coaches insisted streams were slower).
  • Never typed <stdio.h> when learning C—transitioning to later felt like a hardship.
  • Always used <bits/stdc++.h> (aka include-everything-at-once.h).
  • Forever believing freopen > fopen for file I/O… though I’ve long forgotten the reason why.

Looking back

I loved these two courses. Taking them both in freshman fall felt like proving to myself: if I can do this, I can do anything.

Of course, that turned out not to be true. There are plenty of classes tougher than a double-dose of 220+226, and plenty of things outside my control. But it was a fun illusion while it lasted.

(And if you’re my potential PI or employer reading this: don’t worry—I’ve never failed a class. Not even close. Thanks for the concern.)