Reflecting on 8 months of full-time self-study

In the last couple weeks I've decided that I too wanted to level-up on my hard skills but away from CS. I've never been too enamored with trying to sell a product or service that had a lower barrier to entry for competitors. Too much convincing and pitching and , uggh, selling for my tastes.

I've always been interested in Chemistry so I decided to teach myself using textbooks. I realized a while ago that if you have an interests in a subject strong enough to keep you reading and working through a textbook, you can learn anything to a high level because hiding in the pages of a college textbook is the knowledge of many decades of human discovery, engineering, and passion as well hundreds of hours of hours of lecturing, teaching, and even tests (assuming you buy the answer manual). Almost any college course you'll ever take will be a watered-down, rushed meander through a couple chapters in a textbook. If you are willing to go through those chapters, in full, and do most or all of the exercises, you can learn basically anything on your own to a undergrad or graduate (MS) level.

And if you're fortunate enough, as I have been, to be able to fund your own company, your lack of degree doesn't matter because you don't need to signal to anyone that you know what your doing because you are doing the hiring. Granted for what I'm trying to do, I will hire a person with a degree to "head up" my labs for outside credibility's sake.

Last year, I've been on a learning binge myself, due to the fact that I want to understand the underlying workings of the technologies that are shaping our near future. In this interest, I have taken what little time I have (with a job and two children) to relearn the baseline college mathematics that I've lost from my apathy towards serious continuing education. I first completed the course "Learning How to Learn" and applied the practices within to courses in Calculus and Physics. I'm close to completing Single Variable Calculus on the OCW website on MIT.

I was never a great student, and it could be just because, as I think I've discovered, I'm just a slow learner. My early educational talents and successes were due to a lot of early reading that I did, but it's clear to me that it takes a lot of repetition before I start to understand a subject, and I often have to go back over lectures, then read the associated notes, and run through a ton of practice problems (which I then put into anki) before I grasp a subject. Due to this my learning has been slow (along with the two kid situation), but I'm certain now that I have a much better grasp of the subject matter than I did when I was twenty. I'm not suggesting I'm smarter with age, what I am suggesting is that I didn't have study habits that allowed me to flourish.

Clearly, the current educational models that we are using in our schools are failing students like me who get a good head start due to early reading, but can't learn fast enough to keep up in a classroom environment. It is clear from what I've learned about the learning process from Barbara Oakley and others that the actual processes that we put in place are further suboptimal for the learning process, but the ways that we set up our education system are not the result of experimentation. If I were to surmise their source, I would say that they are explicitly designed to fail, so that we can excuse reduced spending in public education systems.

Still, these self-study courses are great for people like me, as long as you are permitted to study at your own rate. This is important as I'm going to guess that perserverance is as important as intelligence when it comes to advancing to the point where you can aid research teams. I predict that nations that automate educational models (as well as hiring a broad staff of educators, lecturers, and tutors) that are successful will have a much larger impact on the future of the information age than they did in previous eras.

Not sure what you mean by “boredom”? I don’t have a clear “definition of done” or a deadline for my sabbatical, that’s also why I try to diversify the topics I’m looking at rather than going through them one after the other. I’ll definitely need/will start working again in a couple of months, but my hope is that working freelance and continuing self-studying is not mutually exclusive. But I’ll need to see next year how this works out then in practice.

Even in hindsight I’m not sure how well it would have worked out for me studying CS back in the day, let alone doing it on my own. But now, with having practical experience of working as software developer, it’s much easier for me to go through books and learn about the theory, because I can relate that to what I have already applied in practice. This way around my mind seems to be able to digest the topics much more easily than going from theory to practice.