[deft]

No offense to the author. But serious question: why whenever articles like this come does everyone say "oh you're not a fraud at all!!". You know what, maybe she is a fraud. If she's being honest in this post she sounds a bit like one. She's crafted the perfect resume to attract attention about AI and it works. But she doesn't really know all that much.

Possible that she has severe imposter syndrome and she sounds above average. But maybe she really isn't as great as everyone thinks she is and she wants people to know that. And maybe people shouldn't pat her on the back and say "no dude you're great don't say that"

*disclaimer: basing this on blog comments and some comments here

[jefft255]

Also, there's something I don't get: how does an undergrad ends up teaching a full blown course at Stanford? Especially considering she doesn't seem to be some kind of super genius, only a probably excellent student. I'm not trying to demotivate her, I actually think it's amazing that he/she is doing this, but how did this happen?

[ataki12]

I have the same background as the author, but a few years older.

Stanford undergrads and grads alike can teach a course as long as they have (1) the necessary background, (2) passion and proficiency in the tech, and (3) motivation to teach and manage course overhead.

Being a "super genius" doesn't correlate with being informative and having intrinsic instructional value.

[jefft255]

I totally agree with your last point, and I wish more university acknowledged this when deciding who teaches classes. My favourite CS course was taught by a first year MS student. For most universities though, letting an undergraduate teach a class is a no-no and it surprises me that Stanford, one of the most prestigious university in the world, would make an exception to that.

Edit: Commenter above clarified to me that the student is not teaching a full blown 3 unit course.

[dlo]

The author seems to be teaching a "student-initiated course." Many universities give students to teach a 1-unit course that is not really part of the mainstream curriculum and does not really count toward the degree.

[rurban]

Same happened to me on a big European technical University. I pushed for adopting a new course, I was the world expert in it, I thought the class for 10 years until someone in the government pushed for a real professor. Now they have another guy who is much less qualified than me, but I was very happy and successful in the private industry instead. And in the end I thought in 3 different universities.

[perlgeek]

I don't know about Stanford in particular, but my experience so far has been that if you just volunteer to do stuff (and maybe have rear cover from one higher-up, but that's often not really required), and don't need any budget, people just let you do stuff.

At work, I started a study club, and started teaching a programming course, all on company time. No pre-approval. Nobody objected.

And the universities I've been to tend to be even more liberal than companies in such matters.

So an undergrad teaching a course doesn't seem questionable to me.

[perlgeek]

You have to make false claims to be a fraud.

It doesn't really matter if the OP (or anybody else really) is a super genius or not. People from outside the field can't tell, and so they approach those with a high media profile, and who match some of the preconceived ideas, like the buzzword bingo mentioned in the blog post.

The same is true even inside our field. When I'm interested in some architectural design pattern, I often read an article by Martin Fowler. Why? Because what he writes sounds plausible, and because I've heard his name a hundred times before. I've never seen production code he wrote, or been on a project he worked on. Maybe he feels like an impostor too, sometimes?

I'm not calling Fowler an impostor; I just want to draw the parallels how second-hand knowledge influences our perception of expertise.

[billf1953]

The simple answer is that this blog post tells us nothing about her skill level aside from the clear resume brags. Google I/O presenter on Tensorflow said something along the lines of "why do we use RELU? Because it works better.. Why does it work better? We don't know for sure." Any field where the basic questions are still unanswered is going to make talented people think they are posers. In fact it's the only rational stance..

[dsfjksdf]

Unless she lied on her resume, it is hardly her fault if recruiting agencies rank her resume so highly. Maybe they should fix their algorithms.

[deft]

Agreed, but she exploited their algorithms which is definitely something 'frauds' do. I'm not even saying it's a bad thing, it's working for her. She shouldn't feel bad but she shouldn't feel like a genius either.