I Am The Mangosteen.

Jeffrey Wan's topically-unfocused blog. It tends to orbit philosophy, poker, and programming. I write when I'm in need of relaxation or clarity.

[jwan622]

Reflections on my time at the Turing School of Software Design, and my life after.

7 months ago, at the start of my time at the Turing School of Software Design, I wrote this post: My Start at the Turing School. 

I was excited to start my education in programming and computer science, but also scared and uncertain about the quality of the school and my interest in programming. After all, I was a philosophy major from a liberal arts school whose career was in the non-technical field of financial trading (an industry where intellect runs low but arrogance runs high... see anything written my Nassim Taleb). Although I was uncertain about where my efforts would take me, I was ready to learn.

And man, did I learn. Now here I am, 7 months later. 

Before I go into what I think about my education and the Turing School as a whole, let me first intro myself as someone who hates bullshit and appreciates plain speak. I am an individual with thoughts that are my own and nothing I write here has been influenced by any instructor, investor, or founder at the school. One thing I really dislike about Glassdoor and Yelp and any other review site is the inherent bias in the review process. The only people who seem to post on Yelp are people with extremely polarized views, and I believe people who are upset have a greater tendency to vent than the content. I’d wager that yelp reviews skew lower than if the reviews were from randomly selected individuals. Glassdoor, on the other hand, seems to have a huge upward skew problem where employers pressure their employees to write glowing reviews (or at least they pull a new or soon-departing employee aside and have them write a glowing review). For example, take a look at these reviews of this company: Trillium Trading. The average rating is not only several standard deviations away from the mean, the reviews seem to take a similar form and were all written within a very brief period of time. So let me be clear and separate myself from the typical company review: I have decided to write this post on my own volition and these words are my own.

Anyway, my thoughts and verdict: I am a believer that 7 months is certainly not enough time to make me an expert in anything, especially for something as mentally demanding as computer programming. But, thanks to the Turing School of Software Design, I not only have a solid foundation to build future learning on, but I also have a hirable intermediate skill for the first time in my career. I am a programmer, and the skill belongs to me. Most of all, I loved my time at the school and the community there.

For 7 months straight, I studied Ruby, Javascript, and their related frameworks of Ruby on Rails, Sinatra, and Angular. I built mock applications, solved sorting algorithms, read source code for Ruby and Javascript, implemented traditional computer science problems like binary search trees and linked lists in Ruby, learned about Big-O notation, recursion applications, caching, and databases queries in SQL and ActiveRecord. I also built applications while consuming real data through APIs like Google’s QPX flight data API, and the US government’s census API. For 7 months, I lived code, and I dreamt in code.

Where has this work gotten me? Well, in my 6th month at Turing, I obtained a job as a software developer and teacher at a startup school/talent accelerator called Andela which teaches Africans how to program while paying them a middle class wage. I left my finance career to partake in more interesting and worthwhile (albeit in a different sense) work and the teaching + software developer position at a school like Andela fit the bill. I always was interested in the field of education and startups and the intersection of the two; I loved teaching tennis and math to kids, and I loved teaching poker to my students when I competed full-time. I feel like this is the best possible start for me out of the Turing School. I feel prepared to teach and make a difference with a skill that is truly mine.

But my highest praise goes to the people and the community at Turing. I’ve never met a group of harder working, kind, intelligent, and humble people in my life. The students ranged from precocious 18-year-olds to comp-sci college grads to parents to war veterans and all of them were exceptional individuals and just extremely pleasant people to work and learn with. I gained so much from being around a diverse but equally goal-driven group of learners and I owe so much to the mentors, the teachers, and Jeff Casimir for helping me get back on track in my career. For the first time in my life, I felt like I was around my people.

So that’s my opinion. Turing gave me a solid foundation in Ruby and Javascript programming and web software design, my first technical job in the field of my choosing, and a wonderful 7 months around my kind of people. In short, it was worth the time and tuition and I give it my highest recommendation to those seeking a career in software design.

[jwan622]

Running off the path into programming...an excerpt from one of my b-school essays (Don't gag!)

I was in the middle of a 5-mile loser’s run, as my captain called it. I had just lost a deciding three-set tennis match to our rival, Williams College. The loss ended our NCAA run and continued our abysmal 12-match losing streak versus Williams, hence my captain’s decision to send me running.

The paths behind the tennis courts were particularly dry this afternoon and I remember the crispy sound and smell of crushed basalt, blown in from the nearby Har-Tru clay courts. My legs were caked in the green basalt and my own sweat salt. I arrived at a fork in the path, but it was a fork only in name; my choice was too predictable. I would always just turn onto route 101 where joggers, bikers, cars, and all others in transit funneled back to the main campus. But I was tired that day. I was tired of losing, tired of following my captain’s juvenile policy of punishment runs, and tired of myself for lacking the curiosity to explore my beautiful campus and the surrounding forests. And so I ran off the path and after several miles of Berkshire forest, I entered the clearing of my college’s best kept secret: our very own wildlife and bird sanctuary. I spent the rest of my afternoon discovering.

Years later, I would again find myself in a state of predictability. I worked as a trader for four years for the comfortable pay and routine until I no longer could stand being comfortable. The boredom awoke in me my hunger for new challenges, impactful work, and a new skill, one that I could add to my lifelong projects of tennis, poker, piano, and Mandarin. Eventually, I found my courage and took the path less traveled. I quit Wall St., began learning how to program in C and Ruby, found the languages equally syntactically complex and satisfying to my creative self as Chinese, and I eventually enrolled in the Turing School of Software Design. I feel like I took the right path, and I soon hope to apply these skills in the education technology world and contribute to its promise of change...

[jwan622]

Nietzschean affirmation of endless learning. Oh the joys of being a programmer.

The point I will be making in this post will seem a bit left-field, but I am going to try to connect two seemingly unrelated topics. I've been in the Turing School of Software Design for 6 weeks now and I'd love to connect my wonderful experience learning how to program with a topic that I enjoyed learning about as a philosophy student at Amherst years ago: Nietzchean affirmation and the Will to Power.

But first off, let me say that today was an inspiring day at Turing. To start off the day, we had Zach Sims from Codecademy come in and talk about the early stages of his company and his own personal experience of being a beginner programmer. The programming challenges that Zach faced are the same ones that I and my fellow students at Turing currently face (wrapping our heads around a new way of thinking, high-level logical thinking, a lack of public well-written learning resources since the best programmers often aren't the best instructors, etc.) and it was so inspiring to see someone devote their time and efforts to the cause of education, raising the ROI and quality standards of education, and helping others find more meaningful work after college outside of traditional banking and consulting jobs. He and his company seem to have a goal higher than just mere economic profit and it was refreshing to see.

After Zach, Jeff Casimir, the founder and pedagogy lead at Turing, talked about the endless learning that is required and expected from programmers, the impossibility of ever knowing everything, and the inevitability of Imposter's syndrome. He said, "In this room, you're never done. No program is ever done. You work is never complete."

Heads fell and heads rose at the completion of that statement. I sensed that some felt dread, while others looked ahead to their future turmoil. It occurred to me how a person interpreted Jeff's short speech was the litmus test of who was cut out to be a programmer.

Princeton professor and renown Nietzsche scholar Walter Kaufmann wrote that Nietzsche "celebrates the Greeks who, facing up to the terrors of nature and history, did not seek refuge in 'a Buddhistic negation of the will,' as Schopenhauer did, but instead created tragedies in which life is affirmed as beautiful in spite of everything. Schopenhauer’s negation of the will can be understood as him saying "no" to life and to the world, which he judged to be a scene of pain and evil. According to the Oxford Encyclopedia English Dictionary, Schopenhauer believed the will and desire of man to be malignants, evils to be terminated via mankind's duties: asceticism and chastity.

Unlike Schopenhauer who positioned himself as the ultimate nay-sayer of life and man's will, Nietzsche positioned himself as the ultimate yes-sayer. One of the key tenets of his philosophy is the concept of "life-affirmation," which embraces the hardships and tragedy of the world in which we live over the ideals of a world beyond. He was more concerned with affirming the hardships of reality and finding joy in the world we live in in spite of all the tragedies, instead of hedging life with the possibility of the life beyond. He admired the Greeks who he felt "transmuted" the world and human life through art, the forces of life (Dionysian), and their love of form and beauty. A person who is able to overcome and find joy in life exhibits a Will to Power which enables a person to not shrink away from the world and its terrors but impose his/her own values on the world. Through the Will to Power, a person can live deliberately with purpose and joy in an otherwise meaningless world.

So, how does this tie in with programming and Jeff Casimir's speech? Well, my view is this: it seems that most of the students here at Turing are able to affirm, in the Nietzchean sense, the hardships involved in programming. The heads that raised up at hearing Jeff's point about the endless work and learning required of programmers were up for the challenges that lay ahead. Personally, I too am excited about these hardships. In my past career as a trader at Trillium Trading, I felt that there was a shortage of interesting work and things to learn. The firm had us first "master", a loose usage of the word, a simple model that takes a few months to learn and then repeat it endlessly in this Nietzchean-esque but non-affirmed eternal recurrence. I desired more: the opportunity to continuously learn, improve, and master a craft. I heard Jeff's words as exactly that opportunity and it seems like most of my fellow students heard it the same way. To the say the least, I look forward to my future 6 months here at the Turing School of Software Design and all of the toil, frustration, and hair-pulling that goes hand-in-hand with endless learning.

[jwan622]

One of my better posts as a poker player. Mental shortcuts fail when the model breaks down.

This post is kind of a question about betting/shoving for protection. it's not really a post about if my flop shove is +EV. I'm pretty sure my flop

[jwan622]

Hello Colorado. It's nice to meet you too!

[jwan622]

Blog transformation, life changes, my first steps in becoming a software developer.

Hey everyone,

I have decided to transform this blog and the Studtor project. I debated between starting an entirely new blog to keep track of my progress and life at the Turing School of Software Design and just transforming Studtor. At the end of the day, I really felt personal about my blog posts and content here on the Studtor project and so I decided to just keep the content but transfigure the blog itself for personal use. 

I recently joined the Turing School of Software Design! I first found out about the school through coworkers of mine at Kitchensurfing who enrolled in an earlier iteration of it years ago called Hungry Academy out in DC. Oh DC, how I miss your grits and fried chicken/waffles. The school originally was a collaborative project between Jeff Casimir and the kind folks over at LivingSocial who were in need of software engineers. The school enrolled 20-something 20-somethings and hired all of them immediately after they graduated. At face value, the school seems like a fantastic investment of time and effort. While doing further research, I had the opportunity to meet and speak with several former Hungry students while at Kitchensurfing and they not only seemed like fully competent programmers with past careers in software consultancies and startups, but also they were helpful, open, kind, and way more conversational and creative than my former coworkers in finance. They noticed my interest in Python and encouraged me to take the next step forward in my life/career.

It seemed like ages ago that I was an equities and derivatives trader in NYC. As time passes, I have only begun to be able to push aside the regret and ill-feelings that I've had towards the industry and former bosses. I think I understand a lot of where my discontent from that industry came from. I wanted academic rigor, the opportunity to self-improve, endless learning and interest in my field, and the technical knowledge and ability to create a good service and quality work that could help others. Trading really had none of those. In fact, trading was perhaps the most soul-crushing, depressing and corrupt industry I've ever been a part of. High management fees, trading profits that were earned in the most valueless and mind-numbing ways, and bank accounts were the only drivers of its people. I simply wasn't ready to acquiesce my life to that standard. After writing this, I can hardly believe it has taken me 2 years to only begin to see that my decision to depart was for the best.

But onto software. What draws me to software? I was a philosophy major at Amherst, I enjoy behavioral psych papers and books in my free time, and I think I've very much embraced my humanities background. So, what gives? Why programming? Strangely enough, my path into programming feels only natural. I've only worked in industries where software has been the backbone of success. I would have been incapable of critical insights without PokerTracker, Rmetrics, and my numerous trading and poker tools. Those simple and user-friendly and insight-creating pieces of software are no simple task to create. They needed to be able to run huge Monte Carlo simulations, import data from exchanges in real micro-second time, and communicate with the stock exchanges in terms of buy-sell and algorithmic orders. The software, and not the people using it, were the real drivers of success.

Also, I noticed that I love skill-building. I take a lot of satisfaction and pride in the skills that I've learned in my life so far. It makes me quite happy that I can play tennis, poker, speak Chinese, write thesis papers in academic philosophy, play the piano, and understand trading markets. By the way, I ranked those skills in order of value and expertise. But in aggregate, these skills make up who I am and are a lot of my story. I'd like to add to that story.

I look forward to meeting and learning with the people out in Turing. I've always had high standards for organizations that I've joined and I probably will be no different from Turing. However, I realize what I get out of an educational organization is what I put into it and from what I've heard, Turing is a well-run and high-level non-profit school. I chose to say "school" and not "business" because I think it's only fair. Turing's non-profit status and the background of its teachers in TFA and charter schools speak highly to me and suggest its management is more concerned about pedagogy than profits. It's refreshing to see to say the least.

Anyway, my subsequent blog posts may be more technical in nature than this one. I will probably be posting more about what I'm learning in the near future. But I first wanted to lay out my mindset going into software engineering school. This is a big change in my life and a big career step for me and I think I just wanted to share...I look forward to continue sharing.

[jwan622]

Is it too late for me to be recruited for tennis by good schools?

Answer by Jeffrey Wan:

So, I played tennis at Amherst and captained the team. I also played a lot of junior tennis growing up. Although I am not an expert on the subject, I will give my two cents because I think I am in a semi-decent place to answer this question. Here it goes! The recruiting process is a mix of subjective and objective data points. A coach will recruit players on his radar and that is a function of your objective ranking, and his subjective memory of you which will largely be a function of your proactiveness in reaching out to the coach. Your first step probably should be to just intro yourself to coaches. Find their emails on the respective school's website and send out like 15 generic emails (be sure to change their name and the school's name!) asking specifically how to get recruited and what they are looking for in terms of ranking and experience. Since you need to compete with other recruits, I'd enter some training programs, play against the wall, play some tournaments, and see if you can get some competition experience. You'll need a ranking because otherwise, you won't have a strong case for recruitment in front of an admissions committee. Get a ranking, and try to win some matches. Join the USTA, play some level 1 tournaments, try to enter a national open to obtain a national ranking. You need to play matches. You need a ranking! Most of the time... a ranking is a necessary condition for recruitment since your case will be presented in front of an admissions board which will require objective measures to get recruited. The other part is just hustle. Contact the coaches and get on their radar. Prior to the hustle though, you somehow need to get good enough at tennis so you can enter and win matches at sectional tournaments and national opens, because wins at those lower level tournaments will help you qualify for super national events (or whatever they're called now). It is at these highest levels where you will have a chance to take down a top dog. You will have a chance to beat some seasoned, lower-seed-junior-who-probably-won't-make-it-as-a-pro-but-probably-will-play-at-Dartmouth-type, in front of a recruiting coach, and then introduce yourself to aforementioned coach in your post-match glory. If that seems difficult, then you need to get practicing. Start out by thinking about what people hate doing (usually it's similar to what you hate doing and I bet you don't like 1) hitting high backhands, 2) sprinting side to side and hitting on the run and 3) playing at the net, especially when you just wind up there as a result of an adept opponent's dropshot and not your own approach shot). Tailor a game around these exploits and you're well on your way. Also consistency is a necessary condition but not sufficient one for success, in case you were thinking of going the pusher-route. The above national-level experience probably only applies to top Division 1 programs by the way. If you want to play at Division 2 and 3 schools, the above criteria are somewhat relaxed. You can get on the team with a lower ranking, but you sure need to get some good high school grades and SATs to play at Division 3 schools like Amherst, Emory, Santa Cruz, Pomona, Hopkins, Middlebury, Claremont, possibly trade-schools like Williams (I kid!), etc. A decent state ranking and some national level experience + pretty great SATs and a high school GPA seems necessary these days to get into academically rigorous schools. Those programs are only getting better and you should check out The Tennis Recruiting Network to verify what I just claimed. Lastly, even if you don't make the team, see if you can walk on the team in whatever school you enroll in and just try to learn. Some coaches have open policies regarding walkons, but others are kind of stringent (and in my opinion, backwards) about the size of the team they carry.... but the best thing you can do right now is practice, find a practice center, and try to learn independently by playing against a wall. Google some training videos. Hit buckets of serves. Play practice matches for money... you need to get over match-time jitters and I think betting on your outcomes with your practice partner is a great way to raise the stakes and experience those jitters. Good luck!

Is it too late for me to be recruited for tennis by good schools?

[ailian]

Good work comes from both following your passion and not following it.

That’s one of the premises of Career Coffee.

Before I launched Career Coffee, I looked that my list of premises - things I believe in about good careers - and thought, “This feels totally disconnected from...

[jwan622]

Thanks Ailian!

[jwan622]

Some mentorship I received from programmers, my thoughts on programming schools, what I want to do next.

I've always been excited at the potential intersection between education and peer-to-peer marketplaces. We have heard the problem of teacher shortages before and the sort of flight of quality teachers to higher-paying schools and the resulting unequal education distribution (the haves and the have-nots). Marketplaces seem like it could solve some problems in the education sphere. By making high-quality teachers known (higher-quality teachers would command a higher price), it gives monetary incentives for teachers to improve in their craft and it also gives access to education to a wider array of people who are not currently enrolled in school. Sure, there are still access and equity problems (high-quality lessons are affordable only to those with the means to pay), but at least marketplaces can activate high-quality teachers who otherwise wouldn't have the opportunity to teach. We forget... a lot of quality teachers aren't currently teaching because they work in other professions (why they don't choose to be teachers is interesting... perhaps it is due to some societal pressure to not be teachers... which is pretty effed up in its own regard) and so having some means to activate these teachers seems like a step in the overall right direction.

In my period of searching for a new career, I was happy to have spoken with some programmers at Kitchensurfing. They felt like my people. They were super helpful, informative, shared information and insights about their paths into programming, answered all of my questions, and were generally just nice and ego-less people. Now I realize that isn't the programming industry as a whole (I've always heard of not-so-subtle sexism in the world... but I haven't encountered it yet) but so far there are a lot of ideals I agree with. The open-source mindset is one that I feel strongly about. In poker, I benefited from open-source essays on game-theory and mathematics and it made my life richer in a monetary and non-monetary sense. I developed and understand and new-found love of these topics and I felt I grew as a person and thinker while learning. In trading, I only wished that there was a greater dissemination of ideas. If there was only a greater dissemination of sound investment advice and greater scrutiny of existing ideas (I wish people had greater understanding in regards to diversification and "technical" analysis), perhaps people could actually take their financial future into their own hands instead of succumbing to the 2/20 model of hedge funds.

My friends at Kitchensurfing introduced me to a well-regarded founder of Hungry Academy and Turing, Jeff Casimir. I had a wonderful conversation with him about his perspective on the programming industry, his experiences working for Teach for America, and his thoughts on programming as a career path. I was somewhat lost in my career path at the time (and I still am not certain) but he certainly helped me feel better about my choice to become a programmer. I didn't necessarily feel like our incentives were misaligned; he was pitching me the benefits of programming from the perspective of a programming school owner yes, but his school's status as a non-profit + his high-regard in the programming industry + his departure from schools whose main incentives were profit-maximization helped build trust in my mind. I thoroughly enjoyed our conversation and I really appreciated his encouragement.

As an additional benefit to our conversation, I also learned about a viable career path that I could take. I've always been interested in education and I feel strongly about its value and it's interesting to see someone transition into educating programmers for the ever-growing tech field. Not only has Jeff Casimir proven that it's a viable business model, but I also think it's very much the future in education. It's odd to me that in the age of technology, there doesn't exist an institution of higher education like law school or business school for programming. It's interesting that law school didn't become a kind of default graduate school option until this past century. A lot of what Wikipedia describes about the early stages of law sounds a lot like programming today: 

Until the late 19th century, law schools were uncommon in the United States. Most people entered the legal profession through reading law, a form of independent study orapprenticeship, often under the supervision of an experienced attorney...

..law school attendance would remain a rare exception in the profession...

Apprenticeship would be the norm until the 1890s, when the American Bar Association (which had been formed in 1878) began pressing states to limit admission to the bar to those who had satisfactorily completed several years of post-graduate instruction.[11] In 1906, the Association of American Law Schools adopted a requirement that law school consist of a three year course of study.[12] 

Perhaps what Jeff has started in the programming world will eventually become the norm. Hopefully in years to come, programming school becomes as much as an option for liberal arts graduates as business school or law school or medical school. I can't see why not? Programming and technology seem to be seeping into everything and it presents a very viable career option to those who pursue it.

In short, it was great seeing how Jeff combined my interests in education and entrepreneurship. The direction and encouragement he provided me was well-worth the 30 minute conversation and I feel even more invigorated and confident that programming, and all its viable career paths, perhaps is the right choice for me.

[jwan622]

Interviews after Studtor's first squash pairing.

So, I interviewed my friend Avi (student of a Squash lesson) about his experience learning squash from a stranger.

Overall, he had a great experience! He loved the quality of the lesson and was surprised that Steph (the instructor) was a first-time teacher. He really enjoyed the cost-free aspect of the lesson. He also mentioned that he would have paid up to $30 for the lesson or exchanged his knowledge of financial modeling for the lesson. I can't tell if he was being polite, but he also said that he'd do it again as a non-guinea pig since he learned the basics of squash. 

He brought up some interesting points. First, it's tough finding good teachers. Even though he was thoroughly impressed with Steph's ability to teach squash as a first-time teacher, he felt like I would eventually have problems finding teachers who are quality teachers. He felt like the student's experience would be poor if the teacher did a poor job of conveying information, regardless of price. I am not certain of this assumption actually...  if my teacher wasn't great but was worth paying $20 for but not $80, would I still go back to the teacher if $20 was the lowest price on the market and if I felt I was still learning? My gut says yes, but I definitely understand his point: scaling while trying to provide high-quality lessons would be very difficult.

Lastly, a thought of my own: Peer-to-peer marketplaces are difficult to set up when the customer doesn't expect variability in the service and when it's hard to provide transparency of quality. For example, I think it would be difficult to setup a business when the service providers vary in quality AND if the customer doesn't expect or appreciate that variability. When I worked at Kitchensurfing, I witnessed this problem to some degree. Customers did not really appreciate that a $60 per head meal would be widely different in quality from a meal prepared by another chef at the same price point. However, I imagine a business like Etsy doesn't really have this same problem. Customers seem to embrace the fact that Etsy's goods vary from item to item. I wonder why. Is it because they like the variability when it comes to bespoke goods? Or is it because the picture of the good on Etsy's site establishes a high degree of trust and sets expectations about what they are buying. My gut points to the latter reason. Unfortunately for my skill-sharing idea, that clarity is not something that a customer has when purchasing a squash lesson or purchasing a chef's services. I wonder how to get around this problem? Do I find a way to provide quality control? Do I believe cutting out services where there is wide variability is a must? How does a company like CoachUp deal with the problem of variability in sports coaching? Is this a major problem? How does a company balance offering quality in-person instruction with quality control and consistency issues?

[jwan622]

Mentorship, a two-sided exchange. Gains for both the teacher and the student

Earlier in the summer of 2014, I began coaching my former high-school's tennis team. I luckily had some free time on my hands and so I decided to help out at my old high school in NYC. Let me first say that none of these kids really needed any help. They were all especially bright and hard-working kids who have already earned passage into the city's best high school and were probably well on their way to prestigious colleges. However, even with these advantages, none of the students on my tennis team had attitudes about privilege. I was especially impressed with their attitudes and humility and their desire to learn; it was a privilege to coach them.

In short, I really enjoyed the teaching process. I had the opportunity to share with a group of intelligent and motivated students the sport that I devoted years of my life to. I felt pride in having the opportunity to share what I knew best. Furthermore, since my students didn't have the privilege of learning tennis growing up, I felt I was saving them time, money, and effort. During my lessons with them, I gave them technical advice for their forehands, backhands, volleys, serves, and an understanding of base strategies. Not only was I able to teach them a tennis foundation so that they could enjoy tennis throughout their lifetime, but they also learned how to think about the sport in a different light. And isn't learning how to think the point of their education?

There was one student on the tennis team in particular, let's call him DU, that I particularly enjoyed teaching. Not only did he share my interest in tennis, but I also learned that he, like myself, had a keen interest in poker. I want to stress that his interest in poker was less an interest in gambling and wagering money and more about the game's mathematical and logical foundation and its training of real life skills: risk-management, problem solving, and thinking under pressure. DU started his high school's poker club and wanted some advice on how to legitimize it and make it educational for its members. As a former professional poker player who strongly believes in poker's ability to create an interest in mathematics, I encouraged him to keep improving the club.

I invited him out to a day at the US Open where we were able to discuss poker and tennis and how he would like to incorporate both into his next few years as a student. I helped him pick out poker-related blogs, video-sites, and books on game-theory and mathematics, all of which he was determined in sharing with the club's members. I also helped him understand some theoretical points about poker (combination math, practical applications of game-theory to poker, ideal bluffing hands to maximize the value of a range of hands, etc.) All in all, I really feel like I increased his understanding of poker and its value as an educational tool.

In addition to the advice on poker, I also was able to share with him some of my experiences in startups, finance, and colleges. DU expressed eagerness in entering either the trading world or the tech startup world and desired to learn about entrepreneurship. Having come from a family without experiences in either field, he was at a loss of inspiration. I was no expert, but having spent 4 years in trading and 1 year in startups, I felt like I was in a position to help him here. I explained to him the lessons that I felt were true in my career: finance and trading were less fulfilling career paths than tech and startups and I advised him to pursue entrepreneurship, cold-email some entrepreneurs who were willing to help out high-school students, and gain some programming chops. He really seemed to listen and I wish him the best in these endeavors.

I enjoyed my time as a mentor. I felt by providing the lessons I learned in my life to an eager student, and giving him some direction as to how to pursue his goals, I was doing a real service, which is something I never felt in my time in trading. I hope to do it again soon and I hope others feel the same way about teaching and mentorship.

[jwan622]

Studtor Squash Lesson 101. Thanks Steph Kwok, Steph Wu, and Avi Das and NYSports!

Signup today at www.Studtor.com to continue learning whatever you want.

[jwan622]

Excerpts from conversations with 3 PHD students about what they want, what they would like to see.

I recently asked some friends of mine who were PHD students what they wanted to see more of in their field. Is there anything that they needed/wanted? What would make their lives easier? Student 1 (AKA LF)

Ok, as for the bigger question. I'm not sure I'm a great person to answer this yet. All of my research is so nascent that I have no desire to have people read anything yet on a larger stage. I could imagine, maybe, when a project is pretty far along but not yet published, maybe wanting to have an outlet for people to see it. A lot of students, especially those on the job market for professor jobs, have personal websites where they could post papers at their discretion. 

I wonder if a social media site where students can friend other students, and kinda make a mini personal website with abstracts of their research projects and maybe drafts of working papers would catch on. I think it would be crucial to have a lot of controls on who can see what, bc you may not always want people to see stuff that's not ready for publication. I could see potential for that maybe tipping. Message boards where you could crowd source questions about the field (or just see who's going to conferences, find people to room with, etc), and a good search engine to see what's out there by topic would be nice features in theory. 

From her PHD friends on the topic of finding PHD papers when doing your own PHD research, and how journals are currently the best gatekeeper of quality, and problems with journals.

The approach is, you learn who the good people are in any given area, and basically you just read their papers. There are enough good people in any subfield, past and present, that you could read papers only from good people all your life and never run out of more things to read. So the obvious problem is that there must be plenty of good papers by unknown people, which will just never get read, hence people will just keep wastefully rediscovering the same things until someone good happens to rediscover it, and then it becomes known. But there's no obvious solution. (The problem of how to get exposure for yourself is the other side of the same coin). 

The current best solution is journals -- each journal has a quality level, journal referees review papers, and if a journal accepts a paper then you can guess about how good it is -- so like that unknowns get a chance and gradually become knowns, but journals are noisy, and they're very slow, so they're pretty good for catching up on what was happening five years ago but not so useful for what's going on now. 

On the topic of cost of discovering new great PHD papers and the cost of just reading them: 

A challenge for trying to come up with a better solution -- these two things are true:

1) The cost of reliably telling a good paper from a mediocre one is very high. To approximately calibrate this cost, think about how time consuming the referee process is, and still the noise to signal ratio is pretty high (a lot of papers in top journals are actually mediocre). I'd guess, not counting the authors' time which is much more on top of this, there's conservatively maybe $10k worth of labor for each accepted paper in a top journal (based on 3% acceptance rate of QJE, 3-4 hrs/paper average referee + editor time -- more for many papers, much less for obviously terrible ones).

2) The cost of just not bothering to read any paper that you suspect is mediocre, is very low (since there's effectively an unlimited supply of good papers, and nobody else is reading the mediocre stuff anyway). 

On MOOCs and their shortcomings:

Hmmm as for the big question about research display and distribution . . .I would have to think more and perhaps discuss at lunch to percolate more ideas . . but my first thought is I knew MOOCs won't replace in person education . . humans just don't have the resolve and attention span to commit to that way of absorbing information.

Lastly, on lit review:

One frustrating thing about doing a lit review is that I never feel complete. i only think i know a topic if i am more embedded in the actual social network of people that work on the topic (george and authenticity). .  otherwise i have no idea if the google scholar generated articles related to authenticity are complete/useless/pioneering etc. it takes awhile to get a sense of the lay of the land, to develop taste.

That's about it for now. I really enjoy listening to PHD students who are in pretty much most regards, extremely insightful, great writers, and clear thinkers. I hope to learn more about what they think can be improved in the field and what technology they wished existed. I would like to learn more and perhaps help fill those gaps in the future.

[jwan622]

A short interview with a PHD student. Insights into what they like, what they need, what they wish existed.

The following is an email from my friend B.D. I asked about his experience as a PHD and if there are any tools/tech that he'd find useful. (abbreviated for privacy). He's a mathematics and math education PHD student up at Columbia who's an extremely insightful fellow.

I sent him this email today:

Hey B.D.

...

2) I wanted to ask you about your experience as a PHD student. In the past few weeks, I've been working on a project with a couple people just researching websites that collect and display written works/lectures/artworks/good writing. We've come across a wide variety of things. MOOCs are popular these days, but obviously there's something lacking. Not many people use them, the quality varies widely, and their claim that high quality education can be accessible anywhere falls a bit short for these reasons + more. I also feel like video isn't the greatest medium for delivering content.

I wanted to ask... when you were a PHD student, was there something that you wish existed? Are there repositories for high-quality PHD writing? What did you use/do to find the works of other PHD students in your field/topic? If you wanted to find papers to keep up with a certain topic... what did you use?

...

-Jeff

His response, which came in under 20 minutes:

...

The question of 'what did I wish existed?' is very good. To answer for doctoral students more generally seems difficult; so I will truly give just a partial answer for myself: Mathematics Education is a very interdisciplinary area; to illustrate this, here are only a few related areas that start with the letter p: Pedagogy, philosophy, policy, problem posing, psychology, pure mathematics, and Creativity = people, processes, products, press. It's tough enough figuring out what's happening in one's own field; imagine trying to make sense of research in related fields... or even (seemingly) disparate fields! Impossible.

The main ways to root out literature, as far as I know, is by reading others' references, and by searching for keywords. Two quick remarks: First, I don't know how well keywords are indexed with regard to synonyms. For example, I recently asked a question on a math site (http://math.stackexchange.com/q/844321/37122) about an object I called a 'balloon'; quickly it became clear that this object has other names: dragon, canoe paddle, kite, tadpole, etc. Combing the literature is perhaps easier when one knows the synonyms! Second, even more than word similarity, one might really be seeking out structural similarity. Drawing again from my own personal experience: How does one assess creativity (of, let's say, a product)? Perhaps an approach to this can be found in other works on assessing other psychological constructs. (How does one assess beauty of a watercolor painting? ETC.) Maybe searching through others' works on assessment -- or even using some form of 'assessment' as a keyword -- will lead me to such literature. But surely I'm missing something.

As I think on the fly: I would have liked to see theses that were singled out for having especially good individual sections. For example: Who wrote an awesome literature review? Or methods section? Or even an awesome abstract? One reads theses before writing a thesis, but it is truly difficult to judge what is high-quality, and perhaps expecting one document to be through-and-through awesome is too much.

Lastly (gotta go back to watching The Voice of China and playing word games...) I think it would be great to know more about research from other countries. People used to be so worried about duplicating research that there were foreign language requirements; indeed, my program requires Ph.D students to pass two (I used French -- which I had to pick up on the fly! -- and sneaked in Mandarin as my other one). These tests are typically outdated, as they will allow the use of paper dictionaries and not electronic ones; but I think the concern is still very real: Someone might be doing something very similar in another language, and I might not know about it. (Consider that Finland and Japan are both considered model countries with regard to mathematics education; I won't speak to how true this is, but I can tell you that I don't read Finnish or Japanese!) So: To know what's happening in non-English work would be helpful.

I've written out my train-of-thought directly, and I'm not proof-reading; so hopefully it's cohesive enough to be helpful!

Let me know if anything is unclear -- hope all is well. Ben

Very interesting. It seems like there are repositories, but not very public ones. It does seem like BD would like some kind of place that had interesting excerpts instead of whole papers. It also seems like he wishes for international research or a research language-converter. All very interesting. I am mostly interested in Google Scholar and whether or not people find it organized, useful, and accessible. I wonder if there's potential for improvement in this space for academics. Can we better utilize this knowledge/author pool of PHDs?

[jwan622]

Intro email for Studtor. Topic: Wittgenstein

Here's an email chain that started when I introduced two people together to speak/discuss Wittgeinstein:

Me: 

Hey guys,

I just wanted to put you two in touch. I don't think either of you met before, but both of you seemed to have an interest in participating in my Studtor project which aims to bring people together for 1v1 conversations and teaching sessions. Dylan, I realize you might not have time now, but I just wanted to put you guys in touch.

Dylan, meet my friend Spencer. He's an awesome teacher (he taught at a charter school in NYC after graduating and served as my logic tutor at Amherst. He also teaches the LSAT out in LA currently and works at Story Pirates, a program that aims to show kids the power and enjoyment of writing) who knows a ton about academic Philosophy and wrote a thesis on Wittgenstein topics. Given his ability to lay out debates very clearly and deconstruct arguments and his knowledge in the space, I'm sure he'd serve as an awesome teacher and conversationalist.

Spencer, meet my friend Dylan. I met Dylan through Tim and Steph and Dylan reached out to me last week when I mentioned your Wittgenstein contribution. He already has some interest/background knowledge on Wittgenstein and I think he would love to find people who he could discuss these topics. Dylan seemed like a curious and interested learner who can grapple with these topics on a high level and I think he'd love to engage.

Basic instructions that you can follow loosely:

1) Setup a time to meet over Google Hangout. You both are on the west coast, so it shouldn't be too big of a problem. Email each other and work out a time. Please CC me on any email convos just so I can keep a log!

2) Spencer will be serving as the teacher and Dylan the student, but these are loose categorizations just to facilitate convo flow. Spencer, if you can come up with some topics to discuss beforehand, that'd be great. Dylan, if there are any topics you'd like to talk about, feel free to email Spencer.

3) Hangout and discuss! Enjoy your convo! 30 min - 1 hour is all you need to do, but if you want to run longer, feel free.

4) When you're done, schedule a quick interview with me. Email me or call me at 212 363 0854. 

Thanks guys and I hope both of you enjoy meeting each other!

The Teacher: 

Oh man, awesome! This is hugely exciting for me. I've actually been reading Wittgenstein stuff for the past few weeks more intensely than I previously had since college, so I am amped about this timing. Dylan, I look forward to chit-chatting immensely. Maybe sometime next week? I'm a little slammed in the middle of the week; how's the end look to you, like next Friday, perhaps?

Jeff, thanks so much for making this happen?

The Teacher, 4 days later:

Dylan, 

My schedule just freed up significantly, so if you have any time coming up when you would enjoy doing this, let me know!

I am really, really, really happy to see the teacher so enthusiastic to share his knowledge base with the student. I just hope the student responds soon? I'd love for them to interact and further along my observations of no-strings-attached student-teacher pairings between peers. 

[jwan622]

[manofprose]

Philosophy is like trying to open a safe with a combination lock: each little adjustment of the dials seems to achieve nothing, only when everything is in place does the door open.

Ludwig Wittgenstein (via man-of-prose)