General

On May 8, 2026 by Jonathan Zdziarski

A couple years back, I wrote about my experience in professional life without a degree, and the challenges it posed. At 50 years old, I recently completed a master’s degree in computer science at Dartmouth College, with a focus on Formal Methods and Artificial Intelligence. The way Dartmouth is organized, I was able to integrate some Electrical Engineering courses into my academic work as well. I’ve waited for half a century to finally earn something, and so for me it’s a meaningful personal accomplishment; having my family proud of me means the world. In retrospect, I’m so fortunate to have waited as long as I did to attend college, as the science we’re studying today is so incredibly cutting-edge.

Education is often squandered on the youth, before students can fully appreciate the problems we’re trying to solve in the world today. Most young students pursue education in hopes of attaining some form of professional achievement and success. That’s admirable, but success typically provides only temporal reward. While success is important and money gets things done, later on in life these alone rarely ever satisfy. In my own journey, I’ve felt something deeper and far more valuable; empowerment to make greater contributions to advancement – and to the common good – than professional success alone can. I also pursued formal education for personal reasons: I wanted the opportunities denied in my youth. I was a troubled teenager, who ended up failing out of high school and later got a GED. I had been told I’d be pumping gas my whole life, and the most depressing thing about that is I was content with that notion, and accepted it as my lot in life, with no reason to ever imagine a life beyond it.

The rigor of the Master’s program was real – and quite welcome. Naturally, I studied material I was truly passionate about and wanted to dive deeper into. Industry’s view of academia is mixed. I ran into several individuals who thought I was wasting my time. They’re not entirely wrong on some level, but miss the big picture. Indeed, many courses certainly make easy work for anyone who’s been in industry long enough, and some theories seem largely detached from practice. That is, however, where experience really can shine going to school later on in life.

Life experience transforms the equation: working in the trenches gives you an advantage many academics don’t have. The ability to discern tractability, identify nuance, and ground computational challenges in reality are skills honored only at scale. With every new thing I’ve learned, I can take it back to industry and the piles of problems we’re already working hard to solve. Learning the gap between elegant theory and messy implementation are two halves of a whole that require both worlds to fully appreciate. This past month, I celebrated nine years at Apple which has greatly shaped my understanding of these things at a very large scale; unless you’ve been in an environment where you’re deploying to billions of people, it’s impossible to fully appreciate the challenges that come with it. Without this experience, many in academia tend to spin their wheels building magnificent castles in the sand. A key ingredient to critical thought is looking at best practices and seeing where they fall short.

The skills I took away have helped to round out my understanding of how I reason about complex computational problems. Engineers tend to build a thing from the ground up without tracing the intellectual lineage that brought us to the current state of the art. Too many talented coders operate at high levels of abstraction without grasping what lies beneath—and that’s both abstraction’s gift and its peril.

Much of industry operates on the principle of, “do it, then talk about it”, while academia favors the inverse. This tension fascinates me. Academia genuinely thinks they’ve invented every good thing in computers, and any and all engineering came from some glorious paper cited more often than it’s been read. Having grown up in a time when we built much of the Internet, such academic beliefs obviously ring as total bullshit; the engineers in the field building the things let experimentation and the love of the work lead them to many similar conclusions. To frame this dynamic, I turned to a theologian by the name of Justo Gonzales to help shape my perspective.

Gonzales argues that history has dual drivers; two driving forces that he calls, “because” (cause/effect), and “so that” (divine purpose). Ask why a billiard ball moves, and a scientist cites the cue ball’s impact – a “because”. Ask the game’s creator, and they’ll say, “so that it sinks in the pocket” – purpose pulling momentum forward. Gonzales saw this in theology and science: divine purpose pulls life forward; scientific catalyst pushes it. Both are essential. The same is true of technology and science: engineering pulls progress forward with purpose – the demand that drives innovation. Academics create momentum – research that pushes us forward. When both align (as they have in artificial intelligence, for example), our advancement accelerates beyond their sum of forces.

After a lifetime of learning through reading books and doing things, returning to school felt like an intellectual high – a direct line to a deep well of knowledge and reason. What younger students see as “grueling work” feels more like play at this age; learning at this stage makes the rigor a firm investment, and keeps me feeling young.

Yes, academia has flaws. One must look past all the pomp of tenured professors and their fragile egos. One must be collegiate, while in industry you’d just call bullshit to someone’s face. R1 universities prioritize research over teaching; they can be more interested in having good research rather than making good researchers. The rigorous environment has, however, forged resilience in many of the students I’ve watched – a trait that industry deeply respects.

I have zero regrets about this late-in-life journey, and plan to continue pursuing a Ph.D. For those who love learning, a good school is like being immersed in warm waters. This baptism is the reward, and not the piece of paper.