Yes, as I write this, I’m still technically in high school. But don’t go just yet—I promise this actually helps my credibility here. Picture yourself as a high schooler, walking into a building full of doctors, dentists, and graduate students. You’re inexperienced and, frankly, intimidated. Yet you’re buzzing with excitement, pretending to be someone important as you stroll through the Edmonton Clinical Health Academy (ECHA).
These were my first two weeks as (technically) an employee at the University of Alberta. The opportunity felt surreal. I really got into the HYRS summer program—wow.
July 2nd was the day before I began HYRS. I skimmed my host’s email of suggested topics: Large Language Models, Neural Networks, Knowledge Graphs. No big deal, right? Turns out that for a high schooler with only basic CS knowledge (and I thought two AP CS exams would put me ahead of the pack), watching hours of jargon-filled videos felt like listening without actually understanding a word they were saying. It’s like reading but only processing the words individually, with no idea what the passage actually means. That was… slightly intimidating. But I kept telling myself one thing: learn as you go.
I’m not going to lie—waking up at 6:15 AM in the summer was rough (also the day I started experimenting with black coffee). After a Google Maps adventure, I finally made it to ECHA with 10 minutes to spare. Orientation was great: I met new friends, explored the campus, scored free pizza, and finally got my OneCard (so I could prove that I wasn’t just some random high schooler wandering around campus… and maybe get some discounts). I also learned, to my horror, that some “peer-reviewed” articles online are pretty questionable—despite my AP Seminar course insisting they’re the gold standard of academia.
Fast forward to Friday—the day I met my host and professor, who brought me to the Mike Petryk School of Dentistry. I was ecstatic to learn that two friends I’d made on day one would be working with me on similar projects for the summer.
Then came the actual work. My host explained we’d work on a program to pull specific data—like dates of birth—from PDFs and convert it into plain text using Python. The problem? I’d never touched Python before. I was a Java kid. To the CS majors out there, this might sound easy, but for me it was definitely not.
She started mentioning things I’d never heard of, like “regex”. So, yeah… I was clueless. She said we could use ChatGPT (which, for a clueless high schooler, was… relieving) to help us code. And while it did do part of the work for me, I still had no idea what I was doing.
That afternoon, Starbucks Refresher in hand, I decided to watch a few Python videos. Unfortunately, they were all way too simple—I still felt completely lost. So—even though I didn’t want to—I spent the week watching Harvard’s CS50 lecture (all 16 hours!) taught by Professor David Malan. Shoutout to him for making it surprisingly understandable. Slowly, I realized that while progress feels painfully slow at first, it gets better. I finally understood regex, learned how to code in Python, and even—as a total amateur—figured out GitHub and Visual Studio Code. Starting with the basics, it all began coming together. For the coders: I now get why you love Python—its syntax is so forgiving compared to Java.
When I returned to my code, everything started making sense. I understood what needed to be done and even added new features. That said, watching YouTube for 2–3 days straight was definitely mentally draining.
I’ll admit, it felt a little strange working on my “cute” Python program alongside researchers with tens of thousands of Google Scholar citations. But by the week’s end, I felt like I was contributing to something meaningful. This was the first step toward helping dentists and doctors extract valuable information from documents.
And here’s the moral of the story: sometimes you just need to zoom out and focus on the fundamentals. It’s okay to start small—progress feels slow at first, but every bit of learning stacks up. You don't need a three-digit h-index to make an impact; you just have to take the first step. For me, that meant Python tutorials, plenty of Googling, and the audacity to pretend I knew what I was doing until I actually did.
So if you’re sitting there, distracted while studying for a final in a few days with no idea what you learned in class… take that first step. You’ll figure it out eventually (at least, hopefully). Or you’ll switch to business. Honestly, both are valid.
Alexander (Alex) D., a student from Sherwood Park, is an avid sports fan and competitive badminton player—which takes up most of his time. He also enjoys playing piano and watching movies or TV, and channels his love for quantitative subjects, like math, into analyzing fantasy NBA leagues to win.