Hacking the Academic Experience

Talk Synopsis

When I was asked to teach Ruby on Rails at Columbia University I observed that a significant number of the skills required to become a successful professional in the industry are acquired on the job and aren’t being taught in school. Many of us professionals thrive on open source software and on sharing code, but academia is not always teaching this type of resourcefulness to students.

This presentation will cover lessons learned from the experience teaching in my alma mater's CS program, how I developed a hacker-centric curriculum, and how we as hackers can fix this.

Biography

Emily Stolfo is a Ruby Engineer and Evangelist on the MongoDB drivers team at 10gen. Before joining 10gen, Emily worked as a Rails developer at a NYC startup but her history with Rails goes back to a research project at Paris' Louvre Museum. She has a degree in Computer Science and Art History and likes to run and attend concerts when not teaching Rails at Columbia University in her free time.