I was a CS major who made a 20 year career in software who was always told I was bad at math and struggled all through school with math. Somewhere about ten yea

I was a CS major who made a 20 year career in software who was always told I was bad at math and struggled all through school with math. Somewhere about ten years into my career I began to realize that it wasn't really that I was bad with math, but that the way math is taught just doesn't work for most people. And, a lot of that math that you were expected to learn is really only directly applicable in very specific circumstances that you might not encounter in your career - which is not to say that the mental exercise of learning them weren't worthwhile! So my point is, if it isn't making sense the way you are being taught, go explore other avenues. There's no way these machine learning algorithms would have made sense to me as a 20-something undergrad, but as a 40-something who can explore them via software rather than a whiteboard, they really aren't that complicated to get started.