While this does sound interesting, right now I'm largely asking so that I can formulate a generic backup plan rather than a specific backup plan. If I can avoid having to leave the program I will; and I'll only know if I'm being forced out in either August or September of 2025 (which I think is a little bit later than it sounds like you're looking for). I may reach out again at a later date if that's okay.

Thanks a ton for letting me know about this though.

You need a proper teaching certification to teach, don't you? Typically something like a master's degree in education.

Evidently.

I'll give it a shot. My undergrad's career center was basically worthless for me (the one piece of advice that they would give out is, 'make an account on HandShake', and then they did nothing else productive), but maybe at a larger school it will be better.

I'm glad there are people who like programming more than I do! Thanks for the support.

Yes, my bad, I get all the TLAs mixed up.

Again, I don't think I can personally work for military contractor companies like Boeing, Northrup, etc.

In undergrad I did a project on harmonic analysis and wavelets, with some attention having been paid to the signal processing applications. (And by that I mean I learned enough to say 'this has applications in the fields of signal processing and image compression' in the abstract). But at this point it's years ago and I don't remember too much.

When I was in undergrad I did debate, and a term that was used to describe the debate topics was "a solution in need of a problem". I think that that very often characterizes the tech industry as a whole.

There is legitimately interesting math going on behind the scenes with AI, and it has a number of legitimate, if specialized, use-cases - sifting through large amounts of data, etc. However, if you're an AI company, there's more money to be made marketing to the general public and trying to sell AI to everyone on everything, rather than keeping it within its lane and letting it do the thing that it does well, well.

Even something like blockchain and cryptocurrency is built on top of somewhat novel and interesting math. What makes it a scam isn't the underlying technology, but rather the speculation bubbles that pop up around it, and the fact that the technology isn't being used for applications other than pushing a ponzi scheme.

For my own opinions - I don't really have anything I don't say out loud, but I definitely have some unorthodox opinions.

• I think that the ultra-convenient mobile telephone, always on your person at all times, has been a net detriment societally speaking. That is to say, the average iPhone user would be living a happier, more fulfilling, more authentic life if iPhones had not become massively popular. Modern tech too often substitutes genuine real-in-person interactions for online interactions that only approximate it. The instant gratification of always having access to all these opinions at all times has created addictions to social media that are harder to quit than cocaine (source: I have a friend who successfully quit cocaine, and she said that she could never quit instagram). The constantly-on GPS results in people not knowing how to navigate their own towns; if you automate something without learning how to do it, you will never learn how to do it. While that's fine most of the time, there are emergency situations where it just results in people being generally less competent than they otherwise would have been.

• For the same reason, I don't like using IDEs. For example when I code in java, the ritual of typing "import javafx.application.Application;" or whatever helps make me consciously aware that I'm using that specific package, and gets me in the headspace. Plus, being constantly reminded of what every single little thing does makes it much easier for me at least to read and parse code quickly. (But I also haven't done extensive coding since I was in undergrad).

• Microsoft Office Excel needs to remove February 29th 1900. I get that they have it so that it's backwards compatible with some archaic software from the 1990s; it's an annoying pet peeve.

• Technology is not the solution to every problem, and technology can make things worse as much as it can make things better. Society seems to have a cult around technological progress, where any new tech is intrinsically a net good for society, and where given any problem the first attempted solution should be a technological one. But for example things like the hyperloop and tesla self-driving cars and so forth are just new modern technology that doesn't come anywhere near as close to solving transportation problems as just implementing a robust public transit network with tech that's existed for 200 years (trains, trolleys, busses) would.

Maybe? With the recent DOGE stuff I'm not convinced that the NASA budget will do anything but shrink, and if I were to do aerospace I would probably want to do it under NASA. (I'm a pacifist, and don't think I can work for the militarized SpaceForce nor contractors like Boeing while still maintaining my personal code of ethics).

But, I will definitely look into it as a possibility.

A big issue that a lot of these tech companies seem to have is that they don't understand what people want; they come up with an idea and then shove it into everything. There are services that I have actively stopped using because they started cramming AI into things; for example I stopped dual-booting with Windows and became Linux-only.

AI is legitimately interesting technology which definitely has specialized use-cases, e.g. sorting large amounts of data, or optimizing strategies within highly restrained circumstances (like chess or go). However, 99% of what people are pushing with AI these days as a member of the general public just seems like garbage; bad art and bad translations and incorrect answers to questions.

I do not understand all the hype around AI. I can understand the danger; people who don't see that it's bad are using it in place of people who know how to do things. But in my teaching for example I've never had any issues with students cheating using ChatGPT; I semi-regularly run the problems I assign through ChatGPT and it gets enough of them wrong that I can't imagine any student would be inclined to use ChatGPT to cheat multiple times after their grade the first time comes in. (In this sense, it's actually impressive technology - we've had computers that can do advanced math highly accurately for a while, but we've finally developed one that's worse at math than the average undergrad in a gen-ed class!)

I don't know much about how to enter into a relationship online; I know people who have done it, but it's never been something that I've been interested in. However, many of my strongest friendships were made online.

The trick to making friends online is to not set out with the intention of making friends. It's paradoxical, I know. What you should do is just find something that you're interested in, find places online you can talk about them, and try talking about them. Personally I like math, so I met some friends on internet math chatrooms and forums. I like Star Wars, and I made some good friends through talking about Star Wars online.

Many such places also have a casual conversation place attached. In niche communities where you (a) are already engaging with people with a common interest and (b) there's few enough people that you will see names and faces regularly, but enough people that the conversation never dies down, eventually you'll become a known quantity and make friends.