Bio

Before I returned to school several years ago, I was a newspaper reporter and editor, and until 1998 had worked for The New York Times. I have also worked at The Wall Street Journal and The Hartford Courant. At the Times, I was a copy editor on the National Desk, which handles news from Washington and the rest of the U.S., besides New York, New Jersey and Connecticut.

I became involved in computer science mostly out of idle curiosity in the early 90's, after I bought my first home computer. Fooling around with that outdated (even at the time) machine must have rekindled my old interest in math and science and I taught myself some programming. After awhile, I started taking classes through the CUNY BA program at Hunter College. At first I had not intended to get another bachelor's degree (my first was a BA in history from New York University), but at some point my interest in my courses overtook my job. After I finished the program at Hunter, I entered the M.S. program at Columbia, took the Introduction to NLP the first year, and in February 1998, left The Times and became a full-time student.