I studied Computer Science at Babcock University with an AI specialization, back when “AI” still meant mostly neural nets in textbooks and not something your grandmother has opinions about. The technical training was genuinely solid — I still reach for things I learned in those algorithms classes more often than I expected to.
But if you ask me what actually shaped how I build software today, it wasn’t a single lecture on Big-O notation. It was a campus culture that treated integrity as load-bearing, not optional.
Small example, big lesson
There was a professor who would rather fail an entire assignment than let a shortcut slide — not because the shortcut broke the code, but because it broke trust in the process. At twenty years old that felt excessive. A decade into shipping production systems for fintech and healthcare clients, I understand exactly what he was protecting.
When you’re the person writing the payment logic, or the healthcare record schema, “it works on my machine” isn’t good enough, and neither is “nobody will notice.” Someone’s money, someone’s medical data, is going to move through what you built. That’s not a metaphor Babcock gave me for free — it’s one I had to actually live inside a values-driven institution to absorb.
The AI specialization, in hindsight
Funny thing about studying AI in a Christian university: you get the technical grounding and, alongside it, a running conversation about what you’re actually building and why it should exist. Not every school makes room for that question. I didn’t always love being asked it. I’m grateful now that I was.
What I carry forward
Every system I build — Estelle, p2pdex.io, the school platforms I’ve shipped for institutions like Doyen Academy — I try to build like someone’s watching who actually cares whether I did it honestly, not just whether it works. Turns out that belief, more than any framework, is the thing that’s kept my code (and my conscience) holding up under pressure.