Dear Kurt and mid-60s Buick owners with 20/20 hindsight,
Fall 1981 I went off to the local community college wanting to be an architect,
. . . .
Looking back what do I wish I had done? I should have done more math and became an engineer. They do what I love to do, solve problems and design things. Counseling was a good career because each student had a different problem to solve, but engineering would have been better. No real regrets though......
What a story! Your life has had a lot of twist and turns hasn't it!
Not to bore you, but I also have had something of regrets when it comes to a technical discipline. My father was a mechanical engineer working on the design of electrical generating stations. I too couldn't easily decide on what I wanted to make of my life, but I did manage to enter U.C. Berkeley directly from high school. It was much easier to do back then. My dad suggested that I get a degree in Physics and use that to wet my feet for possible career choices. Everyone was required to minor in something and I decided to minor in Philosophy. I liked it so much that I ended up turning that into a double major: Physics and Philosophy!
During that time, I ended up getting a lot of exposure to computer technology and decided I would try to make a career out of that. I took a back door by getting into a department in Cal's School of Education: Education on Math, Science, and Technology. There I hit on an idea for teaching tool based on rule-based artificial intelligence which I called an: Educational Apprentice. Describing the concept and building a prototype was enough for a Master's degree. It seemed silly not to test the concept and proved it worked so I decided to get a PhD and (I hoped) secure myself a lucrative career in artificial intelligence. Alas, during the pilot study the concept completely failed to teach anything!
Forced to make something of my failed PhD attempt, I became involved with a very different approach to learning from the Cognitive Science ideas that I was attempting to emulate in my educational apprentice. Ultimately, my love of Philosophy resurfaced and my PhD became an exploration of a novel theory of learning based on the existential thinking of Martin Heidegger! In the ultimate irony, my new views on learning offered a very simple explanation for the failure of my educational apprentice system. I had made a bad choice of learning material in my pilot study. With a slight change, I probably could have gotten my system to work as intended. Alas at that point it was too late!
In the end I would have been better off to have taken my degree in Physics and moved into some sort of engineering. Alas, hindsight is 20/20, but revising that past isn't an option!
Cheers, Edouard
