Going Back to University at 28 Taught Me How to Be Humble

I had decided to go back to university in Alexandria for a master's degree in data science at 28 after five years in marketing analytics, reasoning that the credential and the deeper technical foundation would open doors that practical experience alone would not.

I enrolled with what I can describe only as a somewhat embarrassing degree of self-assurance. I had done this work professionally. I knew the applications. I had solved real problems with these tools in real companies. The theoretical aspects, I assumed, would be straightforward for someone with my background.

In the first three weeks I discovered that the gap between knowing how to use a tool and understanding why it works the way it does is wider and more humbling than I had imagined.

I was in seminars with students who had come directly from undergraduate degrees in mathematics and statistics and who could derive from first principles things that I had been applying as black boxes for five years. My practical experience was real and sometimes useful in discussion.

My theoretical foundation was significantly shallower than I had assumed and became more significantly shallow the further the coursework went. I was not used to being the least technically capable person in an academic environment.

The adjustment required me to do something I had not had to do in years: sit with genuine confusion for extended periods and work through it without the shortcut of having enough experience to fake understanding.

This was more uncomfortable than I had expected and produced something I had not predicted - a quality of actual learning that I had not experienced in years of professional development. When I understood something in that programme I understood it rather than merely being able to use it.

The experience also made me a significantly more effective mentor to junior people in subsequent years, because I had recent, vivid experience of the specific feeling of not knowing something and working toward it, which is a feeling that extended expertise tends to make you forget.