{"id":63,"date":"2010-09-20T06:37:54","date_gmt":"2010-09-20T01:37:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chris.dwan.org\/?page_id=63"},"modified":"2010-09-20T06:37:54","modified_gmt":"2010-09-20T01:37:54","slug":"education","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/chris.dwan.org\/?page_id=63","title":{"rendered":"Education"},"content":{"rendered":"

I attended the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology<\/a> in Alexandria, VA. TJ was something of an experiment for the Fairfax County Public Schools. Admission was based on a test that mapped pretty well to the SAT – but was also based rather vaguely on recommendations and essays. I was a member of the first class that did not overlap at all with the old curriculum. I.e: I never interacted with a bitter upperclassmen wondering why their school had been given over to the freaks and the geeks. The administration and faculty was an odd combination of idealism and na\u00efvet\u00e9. In hindsight, they really had no idea what to do with us. Thus, I was never really indoctrinated with the command and control hierarchy that permeates so much writing about the American High School Experience. I never learned, for example, that there are problems that I’m just not smart enough to solve. I graduated with various honors in 1993. <\/p>\n

I went on to study Computer Science at the University of Michigan<\/a> in Ann Arbor. I resisted engineering generally and CS specifically – but it turned out to be the thing that I was really good at academically. I would take other courses and do poorly, for example Japanese, and use the CS coursework to pull my GPA back above the horizon. Eventually reason won out and I graduated in 1996 with a bachelor of science degree. Along the way I dabbled in whatever other coursework time allowed, including philosophy, women’s studies, and other areas. During this time I worked as a systems administrator with the engineering school’s Computer Aided Engineering Network<\/a>, making Unix and Linux systems do tricks. I made a few bucks an hour for a job that is now easily filled by a tape robot.<\/p>\n

I was fortunate enough to find an employer in town (the Environmental Research Institute of Michigan) with a liberal view towards funding the education of their employees. Actually, it was a cold-eyed capitalist view: They could charge their government contracts 50% more for my time if I earned a Master’s degree, but they would only need to up my salary by a fraction. Therefore, I was encouraged to follow up with graduate school, still in Ann Arbor. I studied Computer Engineering, with a focus on Artificial Intelligence. I graduated with a Master’s degree in CS in 2000. My final project involved some analysis of non-Bayesian schemes of probability and evidence accumulation. If you’re into that sort of thing, it’s pretty cool stuff. <\/p>\n

While employed by the University of Minnesota<\/a>, I took a variety of graduate coursework in Biology. This never amounted to any sort of degree – but it was four years of the part-time graduate school pace that I had become accustomed to in Michigan. This additional coursework has served me well in the subsequent years.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I attended the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Alexandria, VA. TJ was something of an experiment for the Fairfax County Public Schools. Admission was based on a test that mapped pretty well to the SAT – but was also based rather vaguely on recommendations and essays. I was a member of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-63","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/chris.dwan.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/63","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/chris.dwan.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/chris.dwan.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chris.dwan.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chris.dwan.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=63"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/chris.dwan.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/63\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":64,"href":"https:\/\/chris.dwan.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/63\/revisions\/64"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/chris.dwan.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=63"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}