I'm sorry you're having a stressful time of it at the moment but I wanted to offer three points of encouragement: 1) In my experience, I've learned and improve

I'm sorry you're having a stressful time of it at the moment but I wanted to offer three points of encouragement: 1) In my experience, I've learned and improved the most when things have been the hardest. It's tough for you now but stick with it; even just from your opening comments, you've clearly learned a lot already, and that should be the main focus of your first job. 2) A degree doesn't generally prepare you for the world of work, and computer science and software engineering are two different things - success in one won't automatically translate to success in the other. More important I think is that you have the will to work hard - remember the old quote about genius being 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. 3) At my first job, I was working on a client's system because their tape backup drive had developed a fault. As an interim "solution", I configured the backup system to write to a file on the hard drive (so they would at least have a second copy of their data in the event of a problem)... then forgot to mention it to the support engineers and left it like that. Fast forward three months and their hard drive developed bad sectors - my "backups" were corrupted and their tapes were three months out of date. Oops. At the same job, while working on a project to write data to disk using assembly language, I made a mistake and trashed the file system on my development machine, which also contained the only copy of the code I'd spent a couple of weeks working on. It took me another two days to manually piece together enough of the FAT to recover a recent copy of my work (I was making backup copies!) and get back on track. These are the two most memorable f-ups from that job but certainly not the only ones. Now I'm a senior software engineer and I haven't made any mistakes like that in a while :-) But I wouldn't be here without all the failures. Good luck!