I started my Computer Science degree at University of Costa Rica in 2006, after a 1-year stint in technical support (in German, by email) at an American corporation. Before that, I graduated from a German-Costa Rican school and planned to study Computer Science in Germany. RWTH Aachen seemed like a great idea back then, but I didn't have the necessary funds nor a scholarship.

I was never a bright student. I especially regret not being able to excel in mathematics. It's a subject I deeply respect, as I consider the physical and abstract realms as inherently mathematical structures, which no sentient entity will ever fully understand (due to Gödel's incompleteness and such).

However, my appreciation for mathematics lead me to enroll in a Mathematics major, a few years after I started Computer Science. Academically, it seemed like a poor choice, but I deeply wanted to know what mathematics was really about, beyond engineering applications without much proof.

It was a most hopeless, sterile period of courses dropped and retaken. But I was able to confront myself in new ways. I lost against myself time and again, as I was bound to fail in that major from the onset. I didn't have the required stamina, focus, study discipline, insight, and other characteristics a math major would need.

I went back to Computer Science, but I was disillusioned from the beginning. Courses were challenging, but not in ways I expected. It was more about hard, dull work (e.g., debugging Java and C++ exercises) than deep computational problems.

Thus, I got bored and moved full-time to industry for about 4 years. I got the required experience in parallel to my studies. During all that time at uni, I was somehow involved in technical work. Like installing and maintaining Linux server infrastructures all over the uni, either as sole sysadmin or as an assistant to a senior sysadmin.

However, I got burned out from industry, quit in 2019, and came back to Computer Science at the uni. Just in time for the pandemic, I resumed my degree. Still, I'll graduate from a BSc degree in my late 30s. Getting back to industry doesn't seem like an option to me. Making money for others by maintaining computing systems isn't appealing to me, even when the technical challenges might be interesting.

Academia seems interesting, but I have deep and serious doubts about my skills as a Computer Science professor. A respectable professor doesn't just present topics. They challenge students with questions worth pondering about. Is there a more suitable algorithm for the problem at hand? Why would a given OS kernel or network routing configuration become troublesome at scale? Why is a given implementation of a protocol insecure with certain settings? They ought to be able to come up with such questions, by thinking on their feet during the timespan of a lesson.