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What I learned from taking graduate courses this spring.
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Today I have a story to share. Unfolding over a single semester in Spring of 2025, we follow a young professional who strikes out to increase mastery in his field. I’m Ethan Cloin, a software engineer working full-time to develop data-intensive web applications. And for a brief moment, I was also a grad student!
Why, you may ask, would a gainfully employed software engineer pay money to be assigned more work? Simple, I want to be involved in education! Pumping out programs for my company is rewarding in many ways, but I would love to invest more of my time into the next generation of builders.
Maybe that means I should become a teacher? I certainly can’t support my desired lifestyle on a teacher’s salary, and I don’t have any specific qualifications for teaching. One long term goal I have considered is earning a graduate degree.
Pursuing that education would let me learn more about available roles, and I could work towards qualifying myself for those directly. I also want to maintain a presence in the software development industry. Continuously building more working experience qualifies me further to be a mentor for students.
So this year I performed a trial run. Taking advantage of my company’s tuition reimbursement program, I enrolled for two classes at my alma mater, University of North Florida, in their Computer Science Master’s program!
Design and Analysis of Algorithms. Machine Learning.
These beasts stood defiantly between me and my wiser, more capable self. When I was studying for my Bachelor’s, my focus was earning a degree. I just needed to pass. This time, I wasn’t even planning to complete the degree program at all! I just wanted to grow from the course content.
I walked into my class with bright eyes, full of childlike wonder. That energy lasted about as long as you would expect. Working and studying consumed my waking hours, and ate away at my sleeping hours.
Both courses met once a week, at night, for about 3 hours. That’s right. After a 9-to-5 work day, I had an hour to fuel up and plant myself in class from 6-8:45pm.
The primary content of these classes was lecturing. We students would dutifully sit through a PowerPoint presentation, take a 15 minute break, and sit right back down for more slides.
I didn’t like that. Education should focus on fostering informative interactions. Interactions between the teacher and their students. Interactions between students and their classmates. These are the moments that learners are likely to remember.
A semester is a road trip. We have hundreds of miles to cover and altogether too many hours in the car together. We aren’t going to recall particulars of mile markers or exit signs, no matter how neatly formatted.
A shining example of student engagement is David Malan, professor of the Intro to Computer Science course at Harvard. If you have 3 minutes to spare, watch him explain the usefulness of algorithms!
Frustratingly, I didn’t feel drawn to engage with the content presented by either of my professors this semester. Both were clearly well-versed with their material and intelligent people, but neither displayed interest in building rapport with the students. That absence of engagement was detrimental to my learning experience.