I’m starting a very exiting journey, I enrolled on a master’s degree in computer science, I’m on week #1, last week was #0 (or minus 1, it’s complicated). Coming back to school after graduating about 20 years ago from a relatively unrelated field and not being a student for more than 15 years, makes it exciting and at the same time challenging. Is one of the things I’m doing just because I like it, for sure I have tons of professional aspirations coupled with this, but simply put, the main reason is:
“I’m doing it because I want to”.
Let’s say that I would be doing this even without those sound professional goals.
The trill about being able to earn a degree online from an Ivy League University, while listening to my Discover-Weekly in Spotify, having video conferences and being able to handle my business remotely with a laptop and a smartphone is hard to explain to A.G. (after Google) generations. Being forty one, means I saw IT evolution happen, or better said, explode in front of my eyes. I saw things come to life such as: 3 ½” Floppy Disks, Cel phones (I mean it, not smartphones; I saw those too for sure… much later), Internet, messaging, email, PacMan, color computers, the list is long. Studying CS was a growing itch that started long ago and I really had to start scratching it.
One evening, I saw this TED TaIk from Daphne Koller, founder of Coursera, there were several insights for me, first was Coursera itself, I really was not aware of the depth and breadth online education covered, but most importantly how to approach it, is not about adapting classroom learning to remote students, is about taking advantage of its unique characteristics for providing a better education experience. Being a learner (nerdy) when joined Coursera, I felt like an unsupervised kid on a candy store. This master’s degree, called Master of Computer and Information Technology (MCIT) from UPenn, was announced within the platform, and here I am! Starting the journey with a very interesting group of people.