A Discrete Math Class at Ohio State Broke Something Open in My Brain

I almost didn’t enroll in the class. I’d been telling myself a story for years: I’m not a math person. I scraped through the math requirements for my social work degree and never looked back. Numbers weren’t my thing. Logic definitely wasn’t my thing. The abstract stuff that computer science people seemed to breathe naturally? That definitely wasn’t my thing.

But Georgia Tech’s OMSCS program wanted to see formal math preparation, and discrete math was the prerequisite that kept showing up. So I enrolled in an online section at Ohio State, fully expecting to white-knuckle my way through it and pray for a passing grade.

The First Few Weeks Were Brutal

Proofs. Set theory. Propositional logic. I remember staring at my first homework assignment thinking this was confirmation of everything I’d believed about myself. The notation was alien. The reasoning felt backwards. Everyone else in the class seemed to just get it, and I was spending three hours on problems that were supposed to take thirty minutes.

I seriously considered dropping the class. Like, had the withdrawal form open in another tab. I had a full-time job at Veeam. I had a life. Why was I torturing myself with mathematical proofs when I could just keep doing what I was already good at?

Then Something Shifted

I don’t remember the exact week it happened, but somewhere around the time we hit mathematical induction, something clicked. Not the material itself. The realization that the reason I was struggling wasn’t because I lacked some innate ability. It was because I hadn’t built the foundation yet. Every concept that felt impossible was really just a concept I hadn’t spent enough time with.

This sounds obvious when I write it out. But for someone who had spent years telling himself “I’m not a math person,” it was a revelation. The wall I kept running into wasn’t talent. It was just work I hadn’t done yet.

Once I internalized that, the whole experience changed. I stopped treating confusion as evidence that I didn’t belong and started treating it as a normal part of the process. I’d sit with a concept until it made sense, however long that took. Sometimes that was twenty minutes. Sometimes it was a whole weekend. But it always eventually made sense.

The Grade Didn’t Matter. The Belief Did.

I did fine in the class. But the grade isn’t the point. The point is that I walked into that class thinking “I could never do this” and walked out thinking “I just need to put in the work and I can really do anything.”

That sounds like a motivational poster and I kind of hate that I’m writing it, but it’s what happened. Before discrete math at OSU, every hard technical concept I encountered came with this voice in the back of my head saying this is where you hit your ceiling. After that class, the voice changed to you haven’t put in the hours yet.

Those are two completely different internal narratives, and they lead to completely different outcomes.

It Changed How I Approached Everything After

When I hit a wall in Georgia Tech’s edX courses, the data structures material that made me want to throw my laptop, I didn’t spiral. I just worked the problems until they made sense. When Kubernetes networking felt impossibly complex, I didn’t assume I was out of my depth. I sat with it.

That math class didn’t teach me discrete math. I mean, it did, and I use that knowledge more than I expected. Boolean logic shows up everywhere in infrastructure work, and understanding proof structures made me a better debugger. But the real thing it taught me was that the “I’m not a math person” story, and all the stories like it, were just stories. They weren’t descriptions of reality. They were descriptions of work I hadn’t done yet.

For Anyone Telling Themselves the Same Story

If you’re in tech with a non-traditional background and you’ve been avoiding the hard math or the hard CS fundamentals because you’ve convinced yourself you can’t do it, take the class. Take the hard version. Don’t take the shortcut.

You’re going to feel stupid for the first few weeks. That’s not evidence that you don’t belong. That’s evidence that you’re learning something new, which is the whole point.

The difference between “I can’t do this” and “I haven’t done this yet” is everything.