Feeling Lost as a Cybersecurity Freshman in a Dev Project. Any Advice?

So, I’m in my first semester of university studying cybersecurity and thought I’d try something new by joining a group that’s doing some consulting work making websites—nothing too serious (or so I thought!). I figured with my basic Python, HTML, CSS, and a bit of JavaScript, I’d at least have an idea of what was going on. Wow, was I wrong.

The first thing they had us new members do was set up our environment: download VSCode (the only thing I recognized), Node.js, WSL, npm, Git, make a GitHub account, clone the GitHub repo onto WSL… and on and on. I tried to check out the project they were working on, but there were like dozens of folders with technical names that made zero sense to me. The tech lead even spent 15 minutes typing out command after command in PowerShell and WSL to help me set things up, and I still had no clue what was happening.

It doesn’t help that the other newbies are 2nd, 3rd, and 4th-year students, while I’ve only been in university for three weeks, lol.

Now, I feel like I’m in way over my head. I don’t even know where to start to make any meaningful contributions. Every time they talk about all this technical stuff, I’m sitting there still trying to figure out GitHub or Typescript. It’s honestly making me feel like I don’t belong. Does anyone else have a similar experience or advice? Did I make a mistake by joining this group? I’m worried they’ll kick me out or something.

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Hey man, hang in there! You’re not the only one who’s felt this way. I was completely lost in my first group project too, but I just kept asking questions and practicing. Slowly, things will start to make sense. If you feel stuck, maybe focus on just one part of the project that’s more familiar to you, like frontend stuff. The important thing is that you’re learning, so don’t sweat it too much!

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Honestly, what you’re feeling is totally normal. I gotta warn you though—developers can be pretty blunt and not always the best socially. It’s not just a stereotype, unfortunately. Sure, there are devs with great people skills out there, but that feeling of being the one who knows the least? Yeah, that never really goes away, even when you hit senior roles.

I actually left development about a year ago and moved into project management. Funny enough, I was just talking to a teammate of mine who’s now managing the devs on my old team, and we were laughing about this exact thing. It’s just part of life in the dev world.

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I’m in my 7th semester right now, doing my practical semester (basically working at a company for a whole semester). I’d say I’ve got a decent amount of experience, but man, there are so many tools out there! Currently learning to work with PHP, Drupal, Lando, and like 20 other things I’ve barely even heard of before. But hey, it’s fun picking up new stuff and concepts, so no complaints!

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Man, you’ve only been at it for 3 weeks, lol. Totally normal! Even in the working world, it takes months to onboard people. Honestly, I don’t expect new team members to be super productive for at least 3 months. You’re doing just fine!

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Think of this as step one in getting wiser—realizing what you don’t know is probably the most valuable thing you’ll ever learn

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