"I started in 2001. I came to Drexel because of their co-op program. I thought that it would get me a better job after graduation. Which is true, it did, it did succeed in that. Drexel is an interesting place. The 10-week term and co-op scheduling makes every class very intense; you learn a lot of stuff really fast and that is what keeps things interesting, the pace. I got my Bachelor’s degree, went to work somewhere fun and then I was like, 'I want to learn more. I would learn a lot of things very quickly if I go back to Drexel because I know how fast and intense those quarters are.' You feel like you’re always moving forward and doing things because of the 10-week terms and so I wanted to come back and do my graduate work here for that reason. Soon after, I found myself thinking, 'I’ve gotten the hang of this process. I think I can teach stuff this way.' Not only is it interesting from the student perspective but also from the teaching perspective- it goes very fast but on the other side, the students stay engaged. You don’t have weeks and weeks of the same thing where people start to get bored: you’re always moving forward and they always have their next co-op/job interview as a short-term goal that they actively are working towards and it’s always close enough that you can see it.
"I was your very classical computer/video game nerd when I started here. I didn’t want to interact with other people or do social things. I wanted them to just let me work on my own. 'I’ll learn all this stuff, leave me alone to do it.' And then I had group projects that were mandatory… like you were forced to work in a group with other people. In the field of Computer Science, you can’t do bigger projects alone in the given time period. And so I was forced to work with other people and then, at the graduate level even more so. I was forced to work with lots of people from all over the world and go to presentations and explain concepts to people. I actually found out that I ended up really liking how to explain things to people and how to talk to people about things, but had Drexel not forced me to do those things against my will originally, I might not have followed this path."