Independent thinkers, collectivised hobbies: the CS sheep paradox

Despite being stereotyped as solitary and sedentary, CS students share surprisingly unified hobbies. Scour any computing forum, or get on the right tiktok algorithm, and you will find recount after recount claiming a supposed CS bouldering phenomena.

But is bouldering really as prominent a phenomena as the internet may suggest?

At first I considered this just another case of a perception skew, sensationalised by the demographic overrepresentation present on platforms like reddit. Perhaps patterns like bouldering and gaming we are so quick to deem as universal are a hasty consensus, magnified by algorithms and self-selection.

But then I actually started my CS degree.

I noticed that these strangely specific hobbies weren’t just online myths — they were an unignorable element of CS student culture. This article will represent the UNSW CSE demographic, and my subsequent observations and opinions. I will explore what hobbies are common among CSE students, how they cluster and compound, and how these seemingly irrelevant hobbies might shape how we approach our degrees, and maybe even imagine our futures.

What are the 'CS hobbies'?

After conducting a survey among UNSW CSE students, I have found the following hobbies most prominent among the sampled students:

• Gaming (57%)
• Musical instrument (40%)
• Coding (37%)
• Running (34%)
• Bouldering (20%)

So yes, bouldering is not the dominant force online forums might imply. But it is so niche. Specificity gives it an outsized cultural presence. The fact that 20% of surveyed CS students boulder is, frankly, notable. It warrants its unproportional attention and carries enough weight to investigate further.

Still, what’s more interesting is the underlying pattern: Why these hobbies? Why do they cluster the way they do?

Categorising hobbies: the CS archetype

A certain archetype is naturally drawn to CS — and unsurprisingly, to certain hobbies as well. Similar people like similar things, after all.

CS selects for certain personality traits or dispositions: goal orientated, and problem solvers. And many of the common CS hobbies tender a similar mentality. A student's choice to study computer science is not random, it's consistent with these deeper dispositions. The same personality that guides someone into CS will inevitably reveal itself again in their choice of hobbies.

Take bouldering, for example. It can be considered a physical manifestation of engineering/science. You solve problems, often in teams. You adapt. You try different methods and techniques. You fail. You iterate. Is it really so surprising that CS students, in a field so contractually tied to problem solving, teamwork, adaptability and creativity – would be attracted to hobbies built on the same foundation.

Students are funnelled along into both CS and their hobbies because of these personality traits, it's a predisposed route. It matters not what happened first, rather both were an inevitable becoming, guided by the very nature of an individual. It is our cognitive similarities that draw us to both CS, and our hobbies.

Upon further inspection of additional survey data, it became apparent that two striking hobby categories were emerging. Hobbies like gaming and playing an instrument had a mean uptake age of 8.7 and 7.9 respectively, with most responses clustering tightly around the 6-10 age range, as seen in figure 2.

In contrast, hobbies like running, coding, and bouldering were overwhelmingly adopted at 18-19, right around the first couple years of uni.

This clear pre- and post-uni hobby divide suggests more than a coincidence, it alludes to the possibility of certain CS pipelines. Could our career in CS be both shaped by, and a shaper of, our hobbies?

This, I think, is where things get interesting. CS students are pulled by currents of influence, invisible nudges we rarely recognise. Our hobbies predict our degree and our degree, in turn, predicts our hobbies.

Interest: the connector

But what really draws us to these hobbies? The answer lies in interest.

It’s a well enough versed point of public attention, ask most people and they would instinctively agree interests are important in guiding our careers. In a study by Rounds and Su: The Nature and Power of Interests, interests are asserted as a predictive power that can be used to predict career choice, as well as performance and success.

But interest is much more than an emotion. It can be argued that although interest elicits certain emotions such as curiosity and attention, it cannot in its own right be defined as an emotion. Interests are traitlike. They are contextualised traits that always have an object. Interest is not a blank statement trait like integrity or extraversion, interest is always in relation to something else.

Whether it be a certain activity or topic, our interest is always in relation to an external force. Interest captures the relationship between the individual, and their environment. Put the right person in the right environment and BAM interest is the most powerful motivator and tool for success.

Interest connects personality with action — it bridges internal traits with external choices

Hobby reinforcement loops

But how does this all play into our hobbies? Lets return to our two pipelines:

1. Hobby to degree
2. Degree to hobby

Hobby to degree

Are we really intuitively drawn to our childhood hobbies? Perhaps not as purely as we like to believe.

Interest in something is not an isolated phenomena. Our childhood hobbies are determined by compounding access, environment, ability, and positive feedback. We enjoy what we’re good at, what we’re praised for, and what makes us feel accomplished. That’s how the loop begins.

Life is full of moments of coincidence and convenience. We find out what hobbies we enjoy by experimentation, but so much of what we experiment is guided by choices our parents make and situations of convenience.

In the survey responses, students often credited their hobbies to environment or proximity:

“I’ve kinda just always skated because I lived close to a rink.”
“Tennis was because of lessons I had as a kid and my friends also played.”

Just as a child will “choose” a hobby based on access and positive feedback, a teenager will “choose” a degree through the same process.

Take gaming – a hobby claimed by 50% of survey respondents.

Does gaming select for traits that indicate success in CS? Probably. But these same people could be successful in a great matter of other STEM fields.

What gaming does do is put you in a world where CS is presented as an option in life. That moment of realisation when you realise your hobby could become your career — that's critical

You can't consider what you can't see. CS may not be a choice made because you gamed as a child, but it might not have been a choice at all without it.

Degree to hobby

Now let’s reverse the flow of events. There are two key elements here:

1. Social osmosis.
2. The snowball effect

Social osmosis – the passive absorption of knowledge.

I’ve never seen a single full episode of Friends. But somehow, I know all six characters’ names. Through memes, TikToks, references in other shows, overheard conversations, and quiz nights I didn’t study for. I always put an extra line through my 7’s because that is what my year 5 teacher did and I thought it looked pretty. I use the catchphrases and jokes of my old classmates. There are books and songs and cafe orders I love because someone loved them first.

It’s not because I tried to pick up any of this. It just... happened.

We absorb parts of everyone and everything we are exposed to. Our lives are not solely our own. We live with pieces of all the people we meet, we leak into anyone we spend time with.

This is exactly what happens in CS. Indeed, many CS departments in universities are known for being close-knit. You don’t necessarily decide with intention, “I want to be a boulderer now.” It just becomes the default.

You hang out with CS friends who boulder.

You catch yourself nodding knowingly when someone says “V4”

You go “just once.”

You wear Uniqlo and carry a chalk bag ironically.

You’re now 70% boulderer, and you didn’t even choose it.

Friends are one of the most influential facilitators of our hobbies. They present, accompany and guide us in our hobbies. This is reflected in the survey results.

Take out the filler worlds, and “friends” is by far the most repeated word. Response after response cite friends as the reason for picking up a hobby:

“tennis was because of lessons i had as a kid and my friends also played”

“most of these hobbies are because i do them with friends”

“volleyball was complete chance - my friend dragged me into it lmao”

“Bouldering was mainly influenced by friends i met in uni”

“People around me”

And once a hobby takes hold within a subset of people, it snowballs.

To an outsider, bouldering might seem like a niche hobby, but to a CS student, it's a natural progression. Social osmosis fuels the CS–bouldering echo chamber by making bouldering feel like a natural extension of being a CS student. The same goes for running. The more it happens, the more invisible the transformation becomes — and the harder it is to tell where individual preference ends and cultural mimicry begins.

What does this all mean for the CS identity?

So what does this really mean for us – as CS students. CS is notorious for its high drop out rates (10.7% across USA universities). Imposter syndrome and career uncertainty are common struggles. But the hobbies we share — and the culture around them — might actually act as informal support systems.

For many, this creates a sense of belonging in an isolating degree. The lecture hall might feel cold and competitive, but the climbing gym doesn’t.

When you are stuck staring at your screen for hours debugging, or after you flunked that test and are questioning if CS is the right path for you… sometimes what keeps you going isn’t grit or discipline. It's your weekend run. Or that impromptu bouldering session after your tutorial. Or the ten minutes of guitar you swore you didn’t have time for.

As one student put it:

“Small wins motivate u to try big wins”

So maybe the bouldering-CS pipeline isn’t so far-fetched.
Maybe our hobbies are less random than we think.
Maybe we’re all just bundles of interest, shaped by feedback, environment, and curiosity.
And maybe, just maybe — that’s why every second CS student ends up dangling off a wall at 7pm on a Tuesday.

Written by: Summer Manning-Lees