71–80 of 102 posts
What I don't understand is how you get a gig teaching a course at Stanford while being an undergraduate student at Stanford. Is this some sort of special seminar course or something?
https://registrar.stanford.edu/staff/student-initiated-cours...
No offense to the author. But serious question: why whenever articles like this come does everyone say "oh you're not a fraud at all!!". You know what, maybe she is a fraud. If she's being honest in this post she sounds a bit like one. She's crafted the perfect resume to attract attention about AI and it works. But she doesn't really know all that much. Possible that she has severe imposter syndrome and she sounds ab…
Also, there's something I don't get: how does an undergrad ends up teaching a full blown course at Stanford? Especially considering she doesn't seem to be some kind of super genius, only a probably excellent student. I'm not trying to demotivate her, I actually think it's amazing that he/she is doing this, but how did this happen?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also, there's something I don't get: how does an undergrad ends up teaching a full blown course at Stanford? Especially considering she doesn't seem to be some kind of super genius, only a probably excellent student. I'm not trying to demotivate her, I actually think it's amazing that he/she is doing this, but how did this happen?
I have the same background as the author, but a few years older. Stanford undergrads and grads alike can teach a course as long as they have (1) the necessary background, (2) passion and proficiency in the tech, and (3) motivation to teach and manage course overhead. Being a "super genius" doesn't correlate with being informative and having intrinsic instructional value.
Edit: Commenter above clarified to me that the student is not teaching a full blown 3 unit course.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Several studies have shown that the net health benefit of bicycling to/from work is large even when you account for accidents. Not hard to believe when you hear it halves the risk of cardiovascular disease, which is the most common cause of death in the US. E.g. these authors find the health improvement statistically increases your life expectancy by up to 14 months, while traffic accidents statistically reduce it by…
I don't think people think in terms of life expectancy. Do you? Is a 1% chance of dying on your next ride and otherwise living 100 years equivalent to not riding your bike and living 99 years to you? Edit regarding your comment: Oh, I see why you're confused. I didn't need to do the math because I was talking about a 1-time bike ride as an example to just get the point across -- it's already scary for 1 ride. But if…
But the point of bringing up the statistic is to check "is this risk worth worrying about, to the extent that I'm not gonna do thing X"? That's what a rational person does in all situations - is the risk of flying so high that I shouldn't go on holiday? No. Is the risk of falling if I climb that cellphone tower so high that it's not worth it for the view? Yes.
What I don't understand is how you get a gig teaching a course at Stanford while being an undergraduate student at Stanford. Is this some sort of special seminar course or something?
I didn't come off of this article feeling very impressed with Stanford's CS department. Someone with contextual knowledge please explain why I am wrong. I've had my own calculus / discrete math / math for bio courses before but that was after several years as a doctoral student and TA at Georgia Tech. I can't imagine that there isn't a PhD candidate with more experience under their belt both teaching and using Tensor…
No offense to the author. But serious question: why whenever articles like this come does everyone say "oh you're not a fraud at all!!". You know what, maybe she is a fraud. If she's being honest in this post she sounds a bit like one. She's crafted the perfect resume to attract attention about AI and it works. But she doesn't really know all that much. Possible that she has severe imposter syndrome and she sounds ab…
Also, there's something I don't get: how does an undergrad ends up teaching a full blown course at Stanford? Especially considering she doesn't seem to be some kind of super genius, only a probably excellent student. I'm not trying to demotivate her, I actually think it's amazing that he/she is doing this, but how did this happen?
At work, I started a study club, and started teaching a programming course, all on company time. No pre-approval. Nobody objected.
And the universities I've been to tend to be even more liberal than companies in such matters.
So an undergrad teaching a course doesn't seem questionable to me.
Just believe in yourself. It's the people who have the courage that'll end up as leaders. You've just got a taste of it.
No offense to the author. But serious question: why whenever articles like this come does everyone say "oh you're not a fraud at all!!". You know what, maybe she is a fraud. If she's being honest in this post she sounds a bit like one. She's crafted the perfect resume to attract attention about AI and it works. But she doesn't really know all that much. Possible that she has severe imposter syndrome and she sounds ab…
It doesn't really matter if the OP (or anybody else really) is a super genius or not. People from outside the field can't tell, and so they approach those with a high media profile, and who match some of the preconceived ideas, like the buzzword bingo mentioned in the blog post.
The same is true even inside our field. When I'm interested in some architectural design pattern, I often read an article by Martin Fowler. Why? Because what he writes sounds plausible, and because I've heard his name a hundred times before. I've never seen production code he wrote, or been on a project he worked on. Maybe he feels like an impostor too, sometimes?
I'm not calling Fowler an impostor; I just want to draw the parallels how second-hand knowledge influences our perception of expertise.
Outsiders calling on the expertise of relatively junior people is a seems to be a pretty natural consequence of this distribution, though maybe not to the extent described in this blog post.
> It’s a phenomenon that Richard Socher, the dishevelled 30-something (or 20-something?) lecturer who just sold his company for several hundred millions yet still biked to campus, mentioned in his class: “Companies keep asking my students to drop out to work for them.” Why would anyone not continually bike for commuting purposes once they are wealthy? Biking is such a joy whether you're 7 or 70, rich, or poor.