The Once and Future Student
A Vicarious Experiment With My Life
It’s been roughly 7 years since I started my life as a software engineer, but it feels more like 20. For the first couple of years, I was living and working in Salt Lake City. Salt Lake is a city of families where stability and time spent at home are foundational shared values for most of the residents. But, when I left SLC in 2013, I was looking for something else. As a young man I was looking for a way to change the world, and I had been enculturated to believe in the entrepreneurial spirit of startuplandia. I wanted to be a part of a community drenched in innovation, and I thought the world was telling me to “go west, young man”.
I had spent 4 years at The University of Utah obtaining the veritable superpower of computer programming. I learned about the miraculous capabilities of the computer, and how to take real world problems and model them as problems for the machine. I was looking forward to a career centered largely around applying mathematical concepts to the world’s problems. Using the power of the Internet, I imagined myself deploying these solutions instantly to a global community of people who needed my code.
And while I still do believe that there is an incredible spirit of creativity and innovation in Silicon Valley and the broader bay area, I had to learn many times that most of the innovation is centered around making money. As an optimist and a humanist, my disappointment in the technology industry as a whole is hard to overstate.
The years of working towards goals I didn’t believe took a toll on me. Even after I transitioned from engineer to teacher at a coding bootcamp, the pressure to grow unsustainably and the primacy of the profit motive found a way to make even teaching feel a little dirty. So, I’ve decided to try something I once loved: I’m going back to school — and I want you to come with me.
Get A Degree With Me
Despite my frustrations, I have learned a lot in my time as an industry programmer, and I have taken great joy and pride from my time as an educator. Teaching is something I always come back to; in high school I made a few bucks tutoring fellow students after class; throughout college I was a TA for computer science courses, as well as an assistant debate coach for my alma mater. Something about sharing knowledge and watching others learn, sets my heart on fire. It’s thrilling to me when someone says, “I’d never thought about it that way…” or, “OHH that makes sense!” or one of my favorites, “I have a question about that…”
I don’t want to give up my life as a teacher, and in graduate school I’ll definitely have a chance to teach. But, I also want to do more than just teach a few undergraduate courses. The part of me that wants to change the world has been languishing under the valley’s “disruptive” version of change, but it hasn’t died. And thanks to some of the bright spots in the technology industry, there are more avenues than ever for someone like me to share my light with the world.
So, this is my experiment:
As I prepare for graduate school, I’m going to write articles, record vlogs and educational videos, create educational github repos, and create online courses like those found on Udemy, Udacity, and Coursera (first course: intro to graph theory). Funded by my own savings, and whatever I can make on platforms like Patreon, Udemy, and Medium, I’m going to attempt to put myself through graduate school, angling towards a degree that combines genetics, genomics, and machine learning.
In the lead up, I’ll be creating a lot of content about the basics. Solidifying my own understanding of the algorithmic foundations of genomics; reteaching myself the basics of biology and genetics; and expanding my computer science knowledge further into the realms of artificial intelligence and machine learning. As I learn the deeper principles in graduate school, I’ll continue to write, record, share, and (hopefully) educate people on these advanced topics.
Graduate school isn’t an option for everyone, but a lot of the most interesting and specialized knowledge is hard to find outside of a university context. If I can be a part of spreading that information further, I will be happy. If I can pay my bills by doing so, I’ll be ecstatic.
It’s early days, but if you want to keep up with my experiment, and vicariously learn what I’m learning, you can:
- Visit my website.
- Follow me on Twitter.
- Follow me on Reddit.
- Follow me here on Medium.
- Follow me on Github.
- Join the Teb’s Lab Facebook Group.
- Sign up for my weekly newsletter, where I share my milestones, goals, and the most interesting things I’m reading.
- Join me on Patreon.
I hope you’ll tag along on my journey to graduate school, and I hope we’ll all learn a lot on the way.
