September 28, 2016 at 2:37pm

To: Undisclosed-Recipients

From: CS50 Course-Heads

Subject: Welcome

Hey folks,

Congratulations on making it through the first weeks! We’re all so excited that so many of you have decided to join us despite the unfortunate reputation we seemed to pick up last year. (“Natural Causes” is such an all-encompassing term!) We’re so excited for Year 2, and we know you are too! But we understand that, even this early in the term, a few of you are feeling hesitant about the workload. Here are a few testimonials from last year that we hope will clear up any lingering doubts:

• “Everyone says this course was hard, but I don’t know what all the fuss is about. I just paid some guy from MIT to do the psets for me.” — prospective tech executive
• “I miss the sun.” — CS/Math/MCDB major

Aren’t those comforting? Anyways, the stuff we teach in this class is undoubtedly, undeniably, irrefutably essential stuff to be learned by any self-respecting millennial. I mean after all, can you really call yourself a member of the Internet generation if you don’t know what the difference between the Heap and the Stack is? Or how to do pointer arithmetic on the back of a napkin? Or how your computer connects to the local DNS server to acquire an address to which it sends a HTTPS request via TCP/IP, so you can look at “37 Occult Symbols You’ll Never See the Same Way Again?” (Understand some of those words? Join my startup!!)

All this and more lies ahead. See you next week!

Best wishes,

Your course heads
P.S.: It’s been brought to our attention by campus security that late last night, a group of students were found painting 0’s and 1’s on the walls of our lecture hall with the blood of a lamb slaughtered by a brazen dagger. We would like to remind everyone at this time that these actions (or any other instances of occult worship) will by no means affect your standing in this course. What ultimately matters is not so much where you end up relative to your classmates, but where you, in Week 12, end up relative to yourself in Week 1. Lastly, to be totally clear, our course abbreviation is CPSC, not CULT.