Educational Entrepreneurship

 How have your beliefs about learning shaped your education and career choices? Have you ever thought about the global impact that improving the accessibility to education and free flow of ideas and transfer of acquired skills have on the future of humanity and the planet?

I want to be an educational entrepreneur. I want to build a website that systematizes jupyter notebooks with embedded tutorial videos (just like NeuroMatch Academy in which I participated!) for learning how to model neurons and analyze data about neurons. It's making teaching materials in Python that can be easily run on google colab. I want to make it free. There's also a business model, but it's top secret;-) The benefit of computational neuroscience is that you can do it from anywhere and there is an increasing number of very interesting high-dimensional datasets available online for anyone to analyze and explore. And the domain www.learncompneuro.com is free!

There's a course on EdX from Harvard that's called Leaders of Learning. It systematizes aspects of learning by placing different learning set ups along two axes: 1. Individual&Collective, 2. Hierarchical&Distributed. The individual hierarchical quandrant of the axis is how we learned in school. But it's just one quadrant and it's not all there is to life. I like a quote from an interview in the course: "Living things are always in a process of change. They're always in a dynamic state. Learning is the engine that allows us to continue to be dynamic." What separates new kinds of learning modes from traditional ones is that social and cognitive skills essential for success are not easily measured. Nevertheless they are essential for lifelong success.

One of the happiest times in my life was when I spent 6 months teaching at a highschool during the beginning of my Masters. We made a microscope out of a webcam! I showed Lady Gaga videos in class and showed the biological enzymatic mechanisms behind poisoning your boyfriend:-D I would like to teach science to disadvantaged children from poor and abusive families. It is not as glorious as having 10 Nature papers. But it makes me happy. 

 I should also mention that I taught 6 self-composed lectures about neuroscience for people with mental altercations at the Tallinn Mental Health Center about 2 years ago. It made me happy even though I lost my corporate job as a data scientist due to my complete inability to focus on square databases when there is the opportunity to help real people with real and serious problems.

Oh and I also want to make a skateboarding clothes brand that has awesome neuroscience graphics on clothes;-)