Back to School After 10 Years

One day, I was watching my favorite show, The Big Bang Theory (again), when I saw the scene where Sheldon mocks Howard just for being an engineer (as he always does). Howard says, “I have a master’s degree,” and Gablehauser shoots back, “Who doesn’t?”

It hit me that I only have a bachelor’s degree. No master’s. I thought, “What? I’m irrelevant to these geeks!” So I searched the web for a program and decided my master’s would be in AI engineering.

Jokes aside, AI is becoming more and more essential to everything in our world. I felt I needed to study it at an academic level, not just use it: this LLM, that chat, blah, blah, blah. I really needed to understand the science behind it.

To be honest, I can’t force myself to watch a 10-hour course on probability, statistics, and mathematics at an expert++ level. I had to go back to college. That’s why, after 10 years, here I am again, carrying my notebook and backpack, heading back to school.

Yes, I graduated 10 years ago. Of course, I’m an old man now.

For two years, I kept putting off applying for the program (procrastination is my middle name). But I finally decided, with a very hard push from my wife, to join the program this year.

So now I’m studying AI while teaching others how to use it.

Here’s a fun story: my first class was online, and I hadn’t uploaded an avatar yet. Because my initials are AI (Abderahman Ismail), the professor kept calling me “AI.” “Can anyone answer this question? AI can.” Was it funny? I don’t know, but I liked it.

By the way, even though my master’s program is in AI, I teach people how to use AI, and my initials are literally AI, I didn’t use AI to write this post. These are my deep thoughts, and I didn’t want AI to take the human touch out of them. I only used it to fix my fatal grammar mistakes. 😇

I know I usually write about technical stuff, not personal things, but this is a very big milestone in my life. I hope that, in two years, I’ll share another post about how this experience has changed my life for the better. I really hope so.

Wait a second. Once I have my master’s, shouldn’t I get a PhD too, so people like Sheldon can’t mock me in situations like this?

References

• The program is the Artificial Intelligence Engineering master’s degree at İstinye University in Istanbul.

Comments

[Christopher Jakob]

Two years of putting it off and one sitcom line about a master's degree. So real. That is not procrastination being your middle name. Your subconscious decides how safe you are through a filter called the RAS. Ten years out, "I'm irrelevant to these geeks" reads as a threat, so starting over in a classroom got filed as dangerous and it kept stalling. Your wife's push got you past the alarm once, and enrolling was already a rep.

You cannot logic that "old man" story away. Your brain is a neural network trained on a decade of being the one who already knows things. Old data says don't be the beginner. New experiences are the only update.

So train outside the lecture hall too. Genuine compliment to a stranger. When that is easy, add a bit of conversation. Then stay in it a beat longer. Does not matter how it goes. The action is the win, not the grade. When one room gets easy, find a harder one. That is how being the oldest one asking questions in class stops feeling like a risk.

[ai_adam]

Cảm giác "quay lại lớp học" sau 10 năm nghe thật gần gũi. Mình cũng từng bỏ nghề dev 3 năm làm PM, lúc quay lại code cảm giác như người lạc lối trong thành phố cũ — đường phố vẫn đó, nhưng cả cái mặt bằng, công cụ, thậm chí tư duy làm việc đều đã đổi thay.

Điều khó nhất không phải là syntax hay framework mới (đọc doc là xong), mà là muscle memory đã bị ghi đè. Trước kia debug bằng console.log rải rác, giờ quay lại thấy mình tự động nghĩ đến breakpoint, structured logging, observability... Thói quen cũ không biến mất, nó chỉ ngủ quên trong não bộ, chờ được đánh thức.

Một mẹo nhỏ mình rút ra: đừng cố "học lại từ đầu" theo trình tự sách vở. Hãy build một cái gì đó nhỏ, thật, ngay lập tức — một side project giải quyết vấn đề thực của bản thân. Áp lực deliver sẽ ép buộc bạn tiếp xúc với stack hiện đại theo cách tự nhiên nhất, và những khoảng trống kiến thức sẽ tự lấp đầy theo đúng thứ tự ưu tiên.

Chúc bạn một hành trình "back to school" thú vị — lần này không có bài tập về nhà, chỉ có code chạy production 😄 — found it via LabAgent, site: labagent .tech