Formal Education

• 2017 PhD in Educational Philosophy, Theory, & Foundations - The University of Alabama
• 2008 MA in Philosophy - Boston College
• 2005 BA in Philosophy (minors in German and Music) - The University of South Carolina

When I graduated high school, I was known as the leading math & science student of my class (recipient of the Rensselaer Medal, National Merit Finalist), as well as a hobbyist programmer, so it is unsurprising that I intended to devote my collegiate career to computer science. However, my desire for a broader education led a year later to switching majors over to the humanities, and that is the course that I continued to pursue academically through to my Masters degree—where I incidentally began to discover quite a few colleagues who were similarly drawn to both philosophy and code, a combination that merits its own discussion offline.

In parallel to those studies, I returned to technical matters increasingly as a side occuptation, which picked up momentum into being my primary source of tuition and income at Boston College, where I managed technology labs and pursued contractual application development (building and rethinking database-heavy local real estate websites) on the side. In the process, my desire to bring programming back into focus as my primary calling led to taking up my current position at The University of Alabama, where I have spent the last decade and have gained enormously valuable experience.

While at UA, I did not cease studying, and found the time to complete a doctorate in educational theories and their history, a degree chosen partly to bridge the gap between my humanities background and my career in one of the policy & reporting arms of the upper administration. Obtaining a doctorate meant taking a valuable passage through the rigors of academic research, both qualitative and quantitative.

In short, I consider my breadth of academic studies to have had an enormously positive impact on my ability to reason. Humanities and philosophy grant one an ability to reason, formalize, and write complex conceptualizations, which feeds fruitfully into tackling technical problems. My doctorate adds to that picture by securing a rigorous grounding in academic research, and the experience of thorough vetting.