You don't have to be a beginner to use Python. It's a very versatile language and it's object oriented too so the possibilities are endless. Well done you for teaching yourself, I always found it hard to learn on my own which I is why I always did better attending lectures and labs. I found if you don't use it you lose it, I wouldn't be as strong a programmer as I was in college but I'm looking forward to getting stuck into my new course. We're doing C# which is quite similar to Java so you're kind of learning two languages at once.

We have a class dedicated to data structures which I'm looking forward to. When I struggled with solving certain programmes I would memorise certain data structures and step through them with the debugger learning how they worked at each line. I found I could apply a lot of the same code to every day problems I'd face with assignments or labs. I'd recommend learning some basic data structures like searches and sorts. It really helped me.