Midway upon the journey of our life, Dante wrote, I found myself within a forest dark, for the straightforward pathway had been lost.
In the fall of 2022, I found myself laid off from my tech job, divorced, single and heartbroken, running out of money in an expensive San Francisco apartment, and my only adult child living on the other side of the country. It was the fifth time in ten years I’d found myself without a job, and, at age 52, it wasn’t getting easier in the youth-obsessed tech industry to find another. Big layoffs at Meta, Amazon, and others, as well as big firings at Twitter, flooded the market with talent. More than half the job openings I was applying to or actively interviewing for dried up or were canceled. My severance was awful from my last company, so a quick calculation showed that I had about three months of living expenses before I was flat broke. A forest dark indeed.
Enter CMU.
I’d done my graduate degree at Carnegie Mellon University 20 years ago and had kept in touch with people there ever since. I always thought when I grew tired of the tech grind, teaching would be something I’d be interested in doing. Maybe it was that time. The thought of pushing a design rock up the hill of another startup just filled me with dread. The School of Design (where I’d gotten my Masters) was hiring professors but for the fall 2023 semester, not Spring. I was going to be broke a lot sooner than that. For a while, I contemplated living with my parents for a few months, but that seemed like something neither party would enjoy. Luckily, I was spared that fate.
Rather than teach design in the School of Design, why not teach it in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute as part of the School of Computer Science? The HCII was pretty small when I was in grad school, but it had grown to hundreds of students, undergrad, Masters, and Ph.D. Not only that, but it had become a place for other students, like from the Tepper School of Business, to learn about design.
Montage of machinations here: a flurry of emails and calls, a quick trip to Pittsburgh in early December, faculty advocating for me inside, creating a faculty position for me, getting an offer, negotiating and accepting…all of which leads me to pack up a moving POD and my car during a torrential downpour and driving cross country to Pittsburgh.
I arrived the night before my employment officially began. I’m staying in an AirBnB in Wilkinsburg (about 15 minutes from campus) while my house is getting renovated. That’s a story for another newsletter.
The first meeting in the morning was basically walking through a class I’m not going to be involved in this semester, but just learning how classes are structured, how to turn on the cameras (all classes are taught both in person and on Zoom) and a bit of an intro to the service CMU uses for professors and students: Canvas.
Scaffolding is a teaching concept I’m learning. A teacher explains or demonstrates a new concept—that is, setting up a “scaffold.” Students try it. Over time, the teacher stops explaining/supporting (this is called “fading”) as the students start to understand the concept. This way you don’t have to teach every concept at once, but you can build on more and more concepts over time.
The HCII is mostly housed on Craig Street, which is about two blocks from the main campus. I saw my office, which, frankly, blew my mind. In tech, very very few people get offices. Even senior executives get a desk on the floor. In academia, it seems like everyone gets an office, even someone like me who is low in both rank and seniority. My office is separate from most of the people I work with daily, but it’s right off the Future Interfaces Lab, which will be a blast to observe.
I ended my first day coughing in bed, hoping I hadn’t somehow caught Covid again.
As I lay there in a strange apartment, far away from almost everything that is familiar, I thought about how it was interesting that Dante used the term “our life.” Midway upon the journey of our life, I found myself within a forest dark. If you haven’t already, you too will find yourself where the straightforward path will be lost. It’s our life. I hope my journey will help yours. Thanks for reading.
Hey, I'm so glad you landed on your feet!
This was a great read, Dan. I too want to experiment with teaching design some day (ideally in my home country of Pakistan), so I'm eager to hear about your experience.