# The lab where I came alive > A newspaper advertisement, an admissions office, and the first afternoon I sat in front of a computer keyboard. Source: https://waqaspitafi.com/journey/the-lab-where-i-came-alive/ --- A newspaper advertisement, an admissions office, and the first afternoon I sat in front of a computer keyboard. June 9, 2026 10 min Chapter 4 of 10 The day my life changed was the day my parents put a newspaper in front of me. The newspaper was Pakistan’s English daily, and the front page had an advertisement for admissions opening at a college that was offering a new course in computer sciences. The acronym was ICS, Intermediate in Computer Sciences. My parents told me to take the admission and try to come back. I want you to imagine the version of me they were addressing. Nineteen years old. Three years of FSC where I had attended fewer than ten classes. A reputation across my extended family of having gone to ruin. A father who had run out of words. A mother whose look I could not meet at dinner. I took the admission. I went to the first class. I sat down. They walked us into the lab. The lab was small. The lights were low. There were not enough computers for the students, so user IDs were going to be shared. I was assigned a partner. I was unhappy about the sharing. I sat down at the keyboard. I do not have a single big-bang moment to give you. What I have is a series of smaller moments that compounded over the next eighteen months until I was a different person. The first moment was the keyboard itself. Typing on a keyboard, when you have not done it before, is hard. Your hands do not know where the letters are. Your eyes do not stop checking. Every word is a small humiliation. I decided the keyboard was my biggest obstacle. I downloaded a software called Typing Tutor and started practicing it every day in the lab. I was the first to arrive in the morning and the last to leave at night. The software measured words per minute. I started watching the number rise. Within a few weeks I was a touch typist using all ten fingers. I could outpace classmates who had been on typewriters for years. The first thing I had been bad at, which was the keyboard, was the first thing I was now better at than almost anyone in the room. I did not know it at the time, but the pattern I had just learned about myself, that intense practice on the right narrow problem produces an outsized advantage, would be the pattern that ran through the next thirty years of my career. The second moment was C++. I do not know why I fell so hard for C++. The book was on the shelf and I picked it up. I started reading it like I was drinking a bottle of water. I read every example. I typed every example. I broke every example. I fixed every example. The first time I wrote a working program from scratch, without copying it, I sat in the lab for an extra two hours just looking at the screen. The third moment is the one I am proudest of. After my first year, the teacher of the C++ class was unavailable for the next lecture. He turned to me and asked, Waqas, can you teach the class for the next lecture? I said yes. I taught it. I do not remember most of what I said. What I remember is that nobody complained, and a few classmates came up afterward to ask follow-up questions. A year and a half earlier, I had been the boy in the snooker club who could not pass FSC. Now I was teaching a college class. Toward the end of the FSC, I was sitting outside the principal’s office and overheard a conversation. The principal had called my father into the office. He had a small gift for him, a diary. He told my father that sons like Waqas are born to lucky parents. I want you to feel the distance from the slap to that diary. Eighteen months. From the boy whose father had run out of words to the boy whose principal was telling his father that he was extraordinary. My father did not say anything to me about the diary. He brought it home. He kept it. I knew he had it. The board exam at the end of the FSC was harder for me than the college coursework, and I scraped through it. The system favored students who had been gulping books across two years and writing one cumulative exam. I was the student who was good in the daily lab and average on the cumulative paper. The board did not see what I had become. The college did. The college had been my Sir Mubasher. I want to tell you the lesson of this chapter, because it is the load-bearing one for the entire memoir. The boy in the snooker club and the boy teaching the C++ class were the same boy. Same brain. Same body. Same family. The difference between them was a single decision: my parents put a newspaper in front of me, and I went and took the admission. I have spent thirty years trying to figure out why this was the decision that worked when the dozens of decisions before it had not. The closest answer I have come to is this: the previous decisions had asked me to be better at things I was already failing at. The newspaper offered me a thing I had never tried. The medium of failure was new. The shame from the snooker years did not transfer over. The keyboard did not know I had failed FSC. The C++ book did not look at me the way my mother looked at me at dinner. If you are sitting in your own version of the snooker club, the move is not to become better at the things you have been failing at. The move is to find a thing you have never tried, where the previous failure does not transfer. The thing for me was computers. The thing for you might be something else. You will not know until you try. You will not try unless someone, like my parents, puts the equivalent of a newspaper in front of you and tells you to go. If you are a parent reading this, the lesson is the smallest one. Keep putting newspapers in front of your kid. One of them will be the right one. You will not know which one. Just keep putting them in front of him. It worked for me. I was lucky in my parents. The next chapter is about Lahore. [← Previous chapter: The vagabond and the slap](https://waqaspitafi.com/journey/the-vagabond-and-the-slap) [Next chapter: Lahore and the BCS →](https://waqaspitafi.com/journey/lahore-and-the-bcs) Next step ## If this was worth your time, there is more of it I read every message that comes through the form. Specific asks get faster replies than open-ended ones. [Start a conversation](https://waqaspitafi.com/connect) [Read more writing](https://waqaspitafi.com/writings)