Instructional Design Statement of Purpose

I've always been a curious person. In fifth grade, I found a geometry textbook in my teacher's classroom library and remember many excited evenings working through the exercises and feeling the rush of new and better understandings of the world around me. A few years later as a freshman in high school, I was given a calculus textbook by a high school math teacher. I remember feeling that rush again as I spent evenings working through the book's exercises and early mornings before school in Socratic dialog with this teacher.

The very next year I began attending BGSU as a 15 year old through the Post-Secondary Enrollment Options program. I remember being absolutely thrilled that for the first time in my academic career that I could elect to only take the courses I was interested in. I had been disappointed in previous years when signing up for classes in middle and high school where there was only the illusion of choice in what courses I had to take.

At BGSU,  I took a variety of primarily mathematics and physics courses, which helped fill in some of the gaps of my autodidactic calculus education. Reflecting back on it now, it is obvious that since my self-directed learning was just that—self directed—I meandered through the garden of knowledge picking fruits as I went, instead of systematically harvesting the fruit from one end to the other. During this time, I took two C++ programming courses, and then realized that I could easily learn in this field on my own and I halted my formal computer science education. I finished my mathematical education at the University of Toledo, where I again developed my own course of study via a series of independent studies and courses outside of the usual mathematics program.

Using what I had taught myself about computer science, I began a series of entry level programming jobs at tech startups in the Ann Arbor, MI area. Eventually I ended up as the fourth engineer at an educational technology startup that was later acquired. The time I spent at that company opened my eyes to the pedagogy of education, and I realized that with my knowledge and interests, I might be uniquely positioned to help make computer science and technical topics more easily approachable for non-typical computer science students. Putting this in practice, I taught the programming electives to middle school students at a private school in Ann Arbor, MI.

I created a curriculum, and then over the course of my two years teaching there, I refined both it and my own style and opinions on the pedagogical aspects of teaching. I certainly was not the best teacher that those young learners could have had, but I did my best to foster their individual curiosity. Watching concepts like "how does place value actually work" or "what is recursion" click in their heads was very rewarding.

After a series of my own tech startups (some successful and some not), I ended up working at Stripe (a large privately held fintech company) as an early member of their developer enablement team. This team was responsible for building and maintaining a set of resources that Stripe's customers could use to learn how to use Stripe's products. This indirect method of teaching enabled scaling our teaching to more learners than teaching in a classroom could, however it presented it own unique set of challenges. I worked with this team for almost five years, before leaving for my current employer where I lead their nascent developer education and developer enablement efforts.

Through this whole time, I've continued to learn on my own in subject areas that interest me. I'm currently working through a typical JD course of study on my own, and have previously spent a few months working to learn more about physical product design.

I now find myself in a position that is somewhat unfamiliar—I am faced with the desire to learn a new subject area, instructional design, and I find myself wanting to learn this in a formal way that results in a degree instead of in an autodidactic fashion. A formal education on this subject is what I want because I believe that if I learn this topic in a systematic way, it is likely to improve my own self-directed studies and my professional work more than if I learned instructional design by wending my way through the topic on my own.

Given that my day job is leading developer education and enablement for a software company, it is obvious how a formal education in instructional design will greatly augment my existing knowledge based on previous personal experience. The knowledge I will gain will be directly applicable to better enabling developers and a paper credential carries a lot of weight in professional settings.

What is less obvious is why learning on my own is so important to me. Looking back over the courses of my academic and professional careers, it is clear to me (and I've tried to make it clear to readers of this essay) that I am not fulfilled by just doing the same things over and over. I’m a natural teacher, but I don’t like only the act of teaching particular bits of knowledge. I like teaching because I like the act of personal learning that must precede guiding others through their own study of a subject. My hope is that with the knowledge I gain during this degree program, I am able to make my own self-directed learnings more efficient and more comprehensive by knowing strategies and styles for teaching myself.

Just as I knew that my undergraduate field of study should be mathematics, I know that this instructional design program is the right next step for me, and I'm looking forward to reflecting back on my time in this program in the same positive light that I'm able to reflect back on other formative parts of my education.