Halloween has arrived, bringing along chilly fall breezes, oversized sweaters, and horror movie marathons on repeat. But while the rest of the world is busy worrying about haunted houses, masked slashers, and creatures jumping out from dark corners, women at a tech school know true terror looks entirely different. Our jump scares don’t come from cinematic monsters creeping through the woods; they lurk in our code repositories, in the eerie blue light of midnight laptop screens, and in our overflowing inboxes. Forget the haunted hayride; the real psychological thrillers are unfolding right here on campus.
Nothing induces a spike of cold adrenaline quite like the phantom ping of a Canvas notification at 11:47 p.m. It is never a harmless note; it is almost always an announcement from a professor casually mentioning that the midterm rubric has been reworked, or that the autograder has just been updated with secret edge cases. You sit frozen in the dark, watching your hopes for a decent night of sleep evaporate before your eyes. And just when you think you’ve regained your footing after untangling hours of fragile logic, a fresh terror strikes. You run a final test, feel like an absolute genius, and attempt to sync your work, only for the terminal to scream back at you in neon red font because a group partner pushed unformatted changes without warning. Untangling conflicting files at 2 a.m. while a submission deadline ticks down is an authentic, heart-pounding horror sequence that no Hollywood director could ever script.
Then comes the supernatural phenomenon unique to fall recruiting: The apparition of the technical recruiter. Few things are spookier than someone at a career booth who seemed entirely obsessed with your background, promised to fast-track your application, and then vanished cleanly into thin air. You check your spam folder, refresh your inbox every 20 minutes, and wonder if you simply hallucinated the entire exchange. In the modern tech landscape, ghosting is not merely folklore; it is an ongoing haunting that keeps everyone questioning their own worth.
By the time Friday morning rolls around, actual zombies walk the earth, shuffling across campus toward an 8:00 a.m. lab. Clutching lukewarm iced coffee, everyone sits in eerie silence, waiting for hardware to boot or scripts to compile while praying nothing spontaneously catches fire. The ultimate jump scare of the morning is getting called on to explain complex system architecture before the caffeine has even crossed the blood-brain barrier.
Lurking beneath all these everyday campus frights is the persistent, creepy whisper of imposter syndrome, which loves to rear its head right after a brutal exam or an exhausting group critique. But just like every classic monster movie, that doubt only holds power if you let it stay hidden in the dark. You have earned your place here, and your technical skills are sharp enough to banish any gremlin this curriculum throws your way. So put on your costume, carve your pumpkins, and grab a bag of candy to share with the women on your floor. You face enough real-world terrors in class all week long, so this Halloween weekend belongs entirely to you.
