One of the first jobs of my career was with Udacity developing an introductory statistics course. I started my career when MOOCs (massive open online courses) were becoming all the rage. Spurred by YouTube and Khan Academy, the education industry began to view the internet as an effective way to educate thousands of people at a time. I was about the 30th employee at Udacity, and my introductory statistics course was one of the first they released and one of the only original courses that remains one of the most popular today. I was featured in the NYTimes (and then again seven years later), Cisco Newsroom, and Christian Science Monitor. Here's one of the more fun videos I saved from the course:
This role opened the doors to an exciting career in online education. As luck would have it, I got poached by the Stanford Graduate School of Business right after I had completed the development of my statistics course and was struggling to figure out what would come next at Udacity. They were trying to get me to become a full-time statistics tutor for our online students, but I wanted to create additional courses. However, I was only a subject-matter expert in math, and there were only a limited number of math courses I could create before I ran out of topics. I didn't yet know about the role of an instructional designer who works closely with subject-matter experts to create courses. Luckily for me, a manager at Stanford GSB approached me with the proposition to hire me as an instructional designer. When I researched more about what an instructional designer does, I was beyond thrilled.
I worked at Stanford GSB a little less than a year before I got bored and annoyed after being reprimanded by my manager for going to a GSB staff all-hands instead of being at my desk. I might have stayed, but I got poached again, this time by McKinsey & Company for another instructional designer role as a founding member of the new McKinsey Academy, a startup within McKinsey that would create online business courses as a new revenue stream. I would need to relocate to New York City. Hell yes!
I moved to NYC and had two wonderful years in that amazing city before deciding that I wanted more control over what I worked on. I decided to start a consulting business. I moved back to the Bay Area and through word of mouth, obtained fifteen different clients. I retained a contractor position at McKinsey, and also worked with African Leadership University (traveling to Mauritius and Rwanda twice to build out the first year of their pan-African MBA program), Oliver Wyman (in-person workshops for C-Suite executives), Stanford Graduate School of Education (online courses for both students and non-students), and Applied Materials, among other smaller companies.
After three and a half years, I joined Applied Materials full-time to lead online course development focused on semiconductor products. I continue to learn more about this amazing company every day.