Choosing a Program
In January 2022, I was a software engineer at Microsoft, starting to use tools like decision trees and neural nets in my work. I could get things to run. What I couldn’t do was understand the concepts deeply enough to work independently — to make real design decisions and know when I was doing it right.
I’d already completed courses on Udacity and edX. But I kept hitting the ceiling. Free platforms give you exposure. They don’t give you depth.
I needed a structured program — but one that fit my life. I was working full time, and I had a young daughter at home. I wasn’t in a position to step back from either. The program had to be rigorous enough to change what I could do, and flexible enough that I wouldn’t have to choose between my career, my education, and my family.
My first real encounter with Harvard was through David Malan’s CS50. It was challenging in a way that felt honest — intellectually serious. That told me what I needed to know about the program’s character.
How Harvard Impacted My Career
The most direct example happened while I was enrolled in CS 108, Stephen Elston’s data mining course. At the same time, I was building an application at Microsoft. In class I learned a new approach to tooling, and I brought that back to work that week and applied it directly. The application performed significantly better as a result. It was eventually showcased at an organizational town hall.
That’s not a coincidence. That’s what it looks like when a course is at the frontier of what you’re doing.
I’ve changed roles several times since 2022. Each time, the degree was part of what made the move credible — not just to others, but to me. Choosing to pursue a graduate degree as a working adult with years of experience is taken seriously. It signals that you’re not coasting.
Today, I’m an AI engineer at Microsoft, building end-to-end agentic AI systems — AI that doesn’t just answer questions, but reasons, routes, synthesizes, and acts across live data sources. The work I’m doing now is directly downstream of what I learned at HES.
I’d already completed courses on Udacity and edX. But I kept hitting the ceiling. Free platforms give you exposure. They don’t give you depth.
Cutting-Edge Coursework and a Committed Faculty
When AI went from interesting to critical, HES didn’t scramble. The faculty were already there. They updated courses in real time. They were genuinely engaged with where the field was going.
What surprised me most was how seriously the professors took individual students. You can ask a clarifying question six weeks into the semester and get a thoughtful response. The student support is real.
You study alongside students from across Harvard’s schools. The caliber of people in the room and the conversations that unfold are hard to replicate elsewhere.
The Data Science Precapstone
A lot of people in my cohort were skeptical about flying to Boston. By the end of the week, no one was.
Being on campus, in person, with your cohort — it changes the texture of the whole program. You realize you’ve been learning alongside real people with real careers and real stakes, and you finally get to be in the same room with them.
The practical thing the precapstone does is let you find your capstone team. I want to be direct about this: your capstone experience will largely be determined by whom you choose here. Find people who are driven, who are interested in problems adjacent to yours, and who bring skills you don’t have. That’s the team that will make the capstone genuinely valuable.
Balancing Harvard with Work and Family
It’s hard. I won’t soften that.
What it requires is a real plan — a concrete structure you follow. I built a schedule that let me stay present at work, present at home, and still show up to my coursework with something left to give.
Some courses are genuinely rigorous. There were weeks that required more than I thought I had. But finishing them taught me something about what I’m capable of that I couldn’t have learned any other way. If I could take a difficult Harvard course, do my job well, and be there for my daughter, I could do most things.
That confidence is part of what the degree gave me. The technical skills are the other part. Both travel.
