trying to figure out bugs in my code

Yes that always takes some time… And in the end you find out that only one letter(one time a 'K' instead of a 'k' took me a whole weekend) was wrong. :(

But if you don't let others (like the CompSci's in your case) discourage you and get more practice(I suggest games for that one), debugging won't be needed as often and gets easier.

horrible spaghetti crap

It isn't important how your code looks like, as long as you understand it.

I should sit down and try and relearn this stuff when I have more time!

You really should. Especially as a physicist it can be very useful to get more comfortable with programming.