My life story

Locations

I was born in New Brunswick, Canada, grew up in Bermuda (small island in mid-Atlantic), lived in Japan for ~15 years and now live in Hamilton, ON.

Education and beyond

I started undergrad in Engineering but ended up graduating with a degree in Literature & Philosophy. I took the LSAT (got a high score), and was accepted into a law school (Queens). But I had applied to teach English to Japan and two days after getting accepted by Queens I had a letter offering me that teaching job in Japan. Hmm… proceed on the dream path I’d been aiming at for a few years… or go to another country to teach English on a 1 year contract. No brainer, right.

I like Marie Kondo’s suggestion of introspecting and making choices based on whether they “Spark Joy”. Moving to Japan to work sounded a bit outside my comfort zone … but it did spark joy. On the other hand I realized I had been working towards law school because that seemed to be a next “logical” and secure step … but I didn’t have any strong desire to actually be a lawyer.

“Two roads diverged…” and that has made all the difference.

Japan

English Language School teacher

I was hired to work at GEOS - a language school that has since gone out of business. The business model is that they have classes between 12pm ~ 9pm for private, small (2-3 students) or groups (4~10). It tends to be housewivees in the daytime, some secondary students in the late afternoon and adults in the evenings. I was at a busy school in Tennoji, Osaka and taught 20~30 classes a week! Very busy but I loved it. I dove into educating myself on pedagogy and second language learning research. I made a lot of friends, and grew as a person. Being thrown into the deep end like this forces you to get really good at interacting with people and juggle multiple things simultaneously.

Junior High & Senior High School teacher

I then got accepted into the Japan Exchange & Teaching (JET) Programme, which is about placing (mostly younger recent English-speaking grad) foreigners into public JHS and HS to work alongside a Japanese English teachers.

I was moved to a different schools (within Sakai city) each term. A couple were top schools with really “good” kids from comfortable upper-middle class families. But I was told that one was among the most difficult schools in Japan. It was in a poor area with a discriminated minority, social issues and violence. That really forced me to grow as a teacher as well as a person. Teaching rich, smart students with intrinsic motivation is easy. But meeting people where they are and creating a spark for learning in the ‘bad’ school takes some grit. I think a good teacher also motivates and inspires as well as just “teaching”. I had kids come up to me on my last day at both kinds of schools to tell me would miss me and that I had made them interested in learning more. (Including one kid who had thrown a chair at me and tried to punch me in the face during a lesson!)

Academic Director

I spent the next couple years as Academic Director of a language school in Toronto. Part of my job was being the primary point of contact for all students and all agencies. But the main part of my job was managing the teaching staff which ranged from 8 to 20.

University lecturer

I got a graduate degree in Applied Linguistics (concentrating on bilingualism and second language acquisition). I got a job as a lecturer at Osaka Jogakuin College (OJC) - a women’s college. One of the big programmes at OJC was Human Rights studies. I was given the opportunity to develop & teach my own course within this programme - Introduction to Civil Liberties. I also worked at Kansai University part-time and then later moved to work at Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto.

I’d been feeling … unfulfilled for a while. I liked my students. I liked my classes. I liked my colleagues. I made decent money. I had a wife and a house. I loved the free time (lots of paid vacation time!). But it wasn’t what I wanted to do with my life. It didn’t Spark Joy.

I had a vague notion of what I wanted to do. My interest is where I first started university - the intersection of engineering and philosophy, of technology and language. I got another grad degree (part time student) in computer science with a partial focus on computational linguistics. The university I worked for provided me a research budget and didn’t mind me working on my own things in computation linguistics (i.e. automated scoring of student’s essays.) But I really wanted to do hands-on things that would make a difference.

I applied for a “professional” degree programme (Master of Science, Applied Computing) at the University of Toronto. It was a highly competitive programme & admission rate was very low so I didn’t expect to get in. But I did. I showed my wife the acceptance letter and groaned “now I have a tough decision”. She said there’s no decision. It’s what I’ve wanted for a long time. I was accepted so I would go. We’d figure everything else out. My friends thought I was insane. “You have a house and young family and are a full-time professor - you can’t just leave all of that!”

Career Change

Data scientist → ML Engineer → AI Engineer → Engineering Manager

So I went back to school again (in my 40’s!) and had a great learning experience at U of T with some of the top minds in computer science. And that lead to doing an “Industry Internship” (at Wattpad) as a data scientist NLP researcher. My career every since has been doing hands on Artificial Intelligence engineering. All of those details are in my resume.

I think my past teaching experience has had a strong effect on my engineering career. I kept finding myself in situations where I am looked to to lead a function or project. I’ve slowly shifted over to being player-coach manager and more recently more pure people manager. I see a lot of parallels with my teaching career and think it has grounded me as a technical manager .