[hackernews7643]

That is extremely inspiring. Can you speak more to how you went from industry to a community college to getting into and completing a PhD program? Did you quit your job to return back to school? What area did you end up specializing in and what do you do now?

[klyrs]

Long and short, I got sick of the tedium in web development, quit my job and went back to school. The dot-com bubble had just burst, and I had been taking occasional classes including a very inspirational data structures course which planted the seed with formal proofs.

After I went back to school, I tutored in the math study center to pay the bills, which really helped cement not just the learning but also the notion that I could survive academia. I'd gone in with a plan to study engineering, but after I transferred to university, I kept dawdling on the math prerequisites and not taking the engineering courses that needed them. So it kinda gradually dawned on me that math was what I loved, and away I went.

I never strayed too far from computers. I'm a graph theorist, specializing in computation; had I known better I'd have gone into computer science because that's where I see the most progress being made.

[landonxjames]

> had I known better I'd have gone into computer science because that's where I see the most progress being made.

Interestingly this is similar to what my two advisors (one from the math department and one from CS) suggested to me. It would be easier to do the math I like in a CS department than it would be to do the CS I like in a math department. Do you feel like math departments are more conservative when it comes to working outside the discipline?