We live in exceptional times in which the entire world is witnessing the exponential spread of a pandemic, which requires to adopt new habits of mind and behaviors. In this paper, I introduce the term exponential competence, which encompasses these cognitive and social skills, and describe a course for computer science and software engineering students in which emphasis is placed on exponential competence. I argue that exponential competence is especially important for computer science and software engineering students, since many of them will, most likely, be required to deal with exponential phenomena in their future professional development.