When I wrote my last blog post in January 2022, I was starting my Master’s Degree in Computer Science at Georgia Tech, and I was 4 months from becoming a father. That I haven’t written since then is one measure of how consuming those have both been! Unlike graduate school, parenting is a lifelong endeavor with no foreseeable end date or diploma, so Leaf and I have tried to reflect on parenting intentionally by writing in a journal we plan to give our daughter and commemorating birthdays and holidays with photo books and longer reflections. 

But with my degree wrapping up this December, now is a good time to reflect on that side of my last few years. I’m writing this while sitting in a classroom watching students use an AI writing tutor I researched, designed, and built for my Master’s Project. That’s not a sentence I thought I’d be writing 3 years ago for a few reasons. ChatGPT came out in November 2022 and really rocked education. I had already started my program in the “Interactive Intelligence” track, beginning with a class called “Knowledge-Based Artificial Intelligence”, but that domain has exploded since then. The experiment I’m doing today is one that just wasn’t possible until recently, and I also didn’t know much about how to make it until I started over the summer. 

So far, I’ve taken classes on classical AI, AI for robotics, Deep Learning and Reinforcement Learning, Natural Language Processing, and Human-Computer Interaction, and I’m finishing with a class on general software development. A year ago, I joined a research lab that works on applying AI to solve complex, emerging problems in adult education. I’ve learned a ton about real, scientific research and published my first paper, a look into how to predict when learners need help online in open-ended problems with no correct answers.

The average age of recent admits to my grad program is 28.9 years old, and 84% are full-time employees, many at big tech or tech-adjacent companies like Capital One, Microsoft, and Lockheed Martin. Being a high school teacher in my 30’s living outside the US makes me a bit of an outlier, and I’ve enjoyed sharing my story in a few places as a way to express gratitude for the incredible opportunity and to help others make the most of it. Last year, I was featured in a Student Spotlight, and this week, I was on the program podcast with Tanmay Shah!  

With my Master’s Project experiment wrapping up next week, I will focus on analyzing the data, putting it together into a paper (or two), and thinking about what comes next. I’m a CS researcher now rounding out the classic (ha!) trio of Mechanical Engineering, Secondary Education, and Computer Science degrees. It sounds odd at best, and maybe even distracted or lost at worst, but talking with Tanmay on the podcast helped me to see the narrative arc as a life of taking big leaps, figuring out the best way for me to make the world smarter and more compassionate. I’m excited to figure out what that will look like in the years ahead!