Starting in March, I will start a master’s program at University of Brasília, the same university where I graduated almost a year ago. The thought process that I went in order to make such a decision is not conventional and I think it is worth sharing it.

Software Industry

As we know, the software industry values academic achievements only in very specific situations, usually involving big companies with very complicated projects to push, such as the next Apple M3 processor and Windows 12 at Microsoft. Aside from those situations, it is established in the software-development culture that doing anything academic, even graduation itself, should be a decision in which you are aware that potentially will cast a null spell during interviews, i.e., it will not aggregate that much if at all.

Part of the reason that this is the case, is the well-known fact that university is mostly outdated and/or can be replaced with a lot of competitive programming, e.g., leet coding and programming marathons. As someone that graduated in Computer Engineering last year, I can confirm such arguments.

Weirdness

With that out of the way, I must emphasize some phenomenon that I observed during graduation that was crucial for my final decision.

In my final years at university, something started bothering me. From a certain point onwards, I started to notice that my performance was getting better without any explanation for why. I was already aware of the aforementioned points from the software industry, and for me, there is no point in putting an incredible amount of hours into something just to get a 5/6 out of 10 on a piece of paper and move on. Between 2019 and 2022, I thought a lot about the reason why I was putting effort into it, and, most surprisingly, liking it a lot sometimes.

Knowledge

My final conclusion out of these 3 years is that I find the process of acquiring knowledge, i.e., learning, something that holds beauty. And, of course, everybody would agree with such a statement, but that is not enough. It is not enough just to agree, because if it was, everybody that agrees would love studying as an enjoyable experience, instead of spending hours on end with TV shows, parties, and vacations. There must be something else that triggers a change in behavior.

In my particular case, it was shifted by experience. As I had more control to study what I truly like, and get better at doing that, the more addictive it became to me. As I was traveling this journey, the more I saw that I was in pursuit of what makes me contemplate knowledge as you admire a piece of art. As I got further, I was more convinced that this is something worthwhile.

This is everything that I had on hand, though. Because I lost the utilitarian argument due to my field of choice (software development), I couldn’t argue that I was doing this because I wanted a bigger salary. That would only be the case if I was aiming for big tech companies, which is far from my main priority at the moment. The only thing that I could rely on is the fact that I feel beauty and elegance emanating from knowledge in the computer science space.

Proof-of-Concept

After my graduation on May 2022, I continue developing the ideas started at my graduation project, rivika, with my great friend and mentor, Edil Medeiros. We decided that we would try to sell rivika at one of the biggest engineering conferences, Design, Automation and Test in Europe Conference. We aimed for its deadline, September 2022, to publish a paper with a story about the software we developed. Sadly, the paper was refused, with the case being considered bad luck with reviewers.

However, that experience proved to me that I do enjoy and see value in doing scientific work. In other words, I enjoy and see value in trying to augment the existent knowledge that our species have. I was convinced that if I ever decided to do so officially, it would not be because of extra income, but because this is something that I hold value in, something that I see meaning when doing it, something that I see a mission to push forward.

Conclusions

With that, I finished my explanation of why I decided to give academia one more shot. It is because I see the transformation and sharing of knowledge as something that carries beauty. Such a philosophical reason lies in the field of metaphysics, and it is something that I will study more in 2023.

Unfortunately, there are some very critical drawbacks to this decision. First of all, is the complete vanish of free time, now that I will have to accomplish obligatory courses. That means that my current job is at risk or my health is at risk. I will have to grow an intense amount of discipline in order to make these two things talk with sync and not die throughout the process.

Also important is that I may not be able to participate at Dr.Nekoma, at least not with the same frequency. This is such a painful side-effect, given that I value a lot those encounters and projects. As I said in a previous post, this study group is the best idea I had during 2022, and it hurts me to have less of it during the week.

Finally, I hope this experience will allow me to get into deeper planes of understanding of what I already explored during graduation, e.g., Haskell, continuous-time modeling, and simulation, with also introducing me to other fascinating fields, such as hybrid systems and modal models. As I develop my web of knowledge, I hope to learn how to tell these discoveries to other people, with the help of Edil. Science is much more than just a report, it is an intertwined relationship between knowledge and characters in the real world – a dance with ups and downs through time and we build on top of its story in order to uncover the next steps of this saga.

Yeah, I was born for this
I know the risk, but I was born for this
– Divide Music, song Born for This