Anteater Love Story: Change of Major, Change of Heart

For Valentine’s Day, we asked the UC Irvine Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS) community to share their ICS Anteater Love Stories. Here, Angie Xetey, fourth-year ICS informatics student, explains how a friendship grew into a love story. Not only did her relationship status with Han Diedrich (’25, computer science alum) change from friends to romantic partners, but his support and encouragement to conquer fear and explore new things inspired her to change her major from political science to informatics.

We met Week 0 of Fall 2022, quite literally three days into the start of our freshman year. I remember very distinctly walking back from Taco Bell after a night of playing cards, and someone in the group I was with mentioned he was taking the same Gen Ed class I was going to be taking that quarter. But I didn’t think much of it and catalogued it for later.

The first day of that Gen Ed class, I saw him walk in and felt compelled to reach out to him after class, sending an Instagram DM asking if he was in the same class as me. I had never had a conversation with him before, but something stirred within me that made me feel bold enough to ask him if he wanted to sit next to me for the rest of the course.

He was immediately warm, welcoming, and had a keen interest in what I had to say. I knew he was trying to switch his major to computer science, so a lot of our conversations revolved around the change of major process. We first started off as friends, walking each other to and from class, talking about the Poll Everywhere’s and assignments, and looking forward to sitting next to each other. We would cross paths often during our time living in Middle Earth.

I started going to all of his intramural soccer games, going as far as making a team Instagram account to show my fondness for my very good friend, Han. I also started going on nightly walks with him around Aldrich Park, talking about literally anything and everything for hours on end. Our friendship wasn’t limited to just seeing each other on campus, we texted all throughout Thanksgiving Break and during the Winter Break, staying up to wish each other Happy New Year despite our three-hour time difference.

I remember looking at him one day when he walked into INTL STU 14 and thinking, “He’d be a cute boyfriend for someone.” I didn’t know that I would be the someone in question. This isn’t to say I didn’t know he liked me. It was very obvious to everyone around us that we had this palpable crush on each other, but I tried to not let on that I liked him back as well.

Once Winter Quarter started and after a month of swallowing my feelings, I couldn’t bear it anymore and decided that I wanted to bite the bullet and tell him how I feel. I had started thinking about what my life would be like if we stopped being friends, and I decided that friendship wasn’t ever going to be enough. So after a lot of encouragement from my roommate and my friends, they told me to ask him out and tell him how I felt.

As a side note, I had been seeing the number 111 frequently for the past year… on the clock, in the amount of likes of a post, in random number amounts. As a coincidence, on January 11, 2023, we went on a long walk around Aldrich as we usually did and I told him, “Hey, I missed you a lot over break and I’ve realized that those feelings for you go deeper than just as a friend.” This is when we decided we would start dating, so as of 1/11/2023, we have been a couple. We celebrate every time we see 111 pop up and send it to each other every time the clock strikes 1:11.

We started off timidly, with me watching him do all of the ICS series classes but dismissing them as something I would never be able to do. I would be mesmerized by the Python coding he would do, but always wrote it off as something I, a political science major, would NEVER be able to do. But as we continued dating into our sophomore year, I had a crisis and realized, wait…. I want to switch my major to ICS. I used to sit at his desk for hours while he did his ICS51 and ICS46 and think, I wish I could do that, which is when he told me, “You don’t know if you’ll be good at it until you try.” I went through the process of getting into ICS31 just to feel it out, marking the start of my major change process to Informatics after two changes of major previous.

But as we continued dating into our sophomore year, I had a crisis and realized, wait…. I want to switch my major to ICS. I used to sit at his desk for hours while he did his ICS51 and ICS46 and think, I wish I could do that, which is when he told me, “You don’t know if you’ll be good at it until you try.”

I remember failing my first lab exam and sobbing, taking it as a sign that I was never going to make it. Han told me, “This is just one exam, keep going, I know you can do it.” He always believed that I was going to be able to switch my major, and even when I had those moments where I felt like giving up, he would take his time to explain what I needed to understand. I remember him drawing a visualization of how lists within lists worked so that I could understand how to make the controls for my 2048 ICS31 Project, which until that point had been a very serious pain point for me. He didn’t just help me out with ICS31, rather he became the constant in my life that made me believe that ICS was truly for me, no matter how hard it got. I owe my discovery of ICS to him.

Once I switched my major after successfully doing the prerequisites, I started going to hackathons, designathons, and joining ICS-affiliated clubs, which caused me to become more involved on campus. I started blossoming as a professional, so during our final year together, I told him to apply to CareTech to grow his skills as a programmer, while I applied to ZotBins and other initiatives.

This is where ICS really influenced our relationship because it made us bond over extracurriculars and motivate each other to be better, which is still something we do even now that he’s graduated. We decided that it wasn’t enough to just be in the same major together, we had to keep going and fulfilling our ambitions. His senior year and my junior year, we did two of the hackathons hosted here together, working on IrvineHacks and VenusHacks of 2025 to really test our tech skills, but also how we work as a team.

We became each other’s biggest fans within the ICS community and bridged our strengths to understand each other, mine with design and his with coding. We even took one last class together, INF115, which was QA Testing, to really embrace the dream we once had of being in the same major. Being able to understand each other’s jargon and really see where our strengths lay brought us together as a unit because we knew that we were right where we needed to be.

…we continue to bond over ICS coursework, the ICS community, and what it means to have believed in each other for so long, and our relationship is as strong as ever. We plan to always give back to the community that helped us find that common ground, and we will always be each other’s biggest cheerleaders.

Even now that he’s an alum, he still shows up and supports my ICS endeavors, like watching me present for DAUCI Project Teams and mentoring ZotHacks, giving back to the ICS community that helped us grow. There are still so many things to unfold especially as I near graduation, but in the meantime, we continue to bond over ICS coursework, the ICS community, and what it means to have believed in each other for so long, and our relationship is as strong as ever. We plan to always give back to the community that helped us find that common ground, and we will always be each other’s biggest cheerleaders.

– Tonya Becerra