Good news, everyone! My admission application to The Recurse Center has been accepted and I will be moving to New York City in early May to attend the Summer I batch from May 22 to August 10th.

I’m really excited for this opportunity and think it’s perfect for my career trajectory. I’ve been dissatisfied with academia and realized a little while ago that I’m probably not cut out for a long-term career in it, and want to sharpen my skills as a programmer instead. The jobs and possible career paths that are most interesting to me have a data software development focus rather than hard science, i. e., getting papers published. I learned software development from a physics perspective rather than a computer science perspective, and working alone, siloed, in most of my research topics and projects has been rather limiting to me in that regard. For example, the first time I’ve ever pair-programmed was during my RC interview and I’m not aware of any instance of any other person ever using software that I wrote for DFT/MD purposes. In addition to that, the software I’ve written as a postdoc is property of my PI, who has forbidden me from open-sourcing it. I need a breath of fresh air and to spend time in an environment where I can grow my potential.

Of course, I’ll have much more to say about Recurse in the coming months but for now, I’d love to sharpen my large-scale development chops, contribute to some open-source software, start some cool projects in data science and machine learning, do some full stack web development, and try to throw in a little PICO-8 project, too! It’s definitely going to be a jam-packed 3 months. But yeah, to summarize: I’m a Recurser! Woohoo!