I've been procrastinating on writing blogs for a while now. Today I finally sat down and did it.
Before starting at Accra Technical University (ATU), I did something a little unusual: I spent a good chunk of time planning how I'd self-study using MIT's curriculum alongside my degree. That planning process alone probably deserves its own post.
Picking a Path
My career aspiration is to contribute to solving neurological problems, so I used Gemini to help me figure out which MIT course would align with that. It recommended Course 6-9, Computation and Cognition. I looked into it, liked what I saw, then fed all the relevant links and resources into NotebookLM and used it to help me brainstorm how to actually approach the course. We spent a lot of time on that planning phase.
The conclusion was that I'd need to start with MIT's GIRs, the General Institute Requirements every MIT student has to clear first.
Choosing the Courses
For the science core, the decision was math, physics, and chemistry, skipping biology for now. On MIT OpenCourseWare, I settled on:
- 18.01SC, Single Variable Calculus
- 8.01SC, Classical Mechanics
- 5.111SC, Principles of Chemical Science
For the communication and HASS (Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences) requirements, I learned you could knock both out with a single course, so I went with Writing and Rhetoric, 21W.011.
For the PE requirement, I went with swimming and self-defense.
Settling Into a Rhythm
Once I started, it was great. A lot of it was revision, since I'd already covered much of this material back in secondary school and through personal study afterward with resources like Khan Academy.
For the science core, I was studying every day. The plan was 2Ps, roughly two hours a day. (I'll get into what "Ps" means in a future post.)
For the PE requirement, I downloaded a self-defense playlist from YouTube. I learned a lot, though it stayed mostly theoretical since I never got to practice physically. Still, I noticed a real shift: I became more alert, more aware of my surroundings, than I was before taking the course.
I remember finishing it during a blackout, watching the last lecture with no light in the house, around the time Kekeli had gone to Obuasi. Random detail, but it's stuck with me.
The weekly rhythm for the science core looked like this: Monday and Tuesday for math, Wednesday and Thursday for physics, Friday for chemistry, and Saturday for Writing and Rhetoric. It ran for quite a while, and I genuinely enjoyed the lectures and the lecturers themselves. I think they deserve their own post too.
Why I Stopped
Eventually, I decided to pause. The reason was simple: I'd decided to step away from pursuing a career in the traditional sense and focus instead on solving problems directly, starting with the most pressing one I was facing, which was finance. I was over 90% dependent on others financially, and I wanted to fix that before turning my full attention back to everything else.
So I stopped studying and put my energy into building toward financial independence.
Coming Back
Recently, I decided to pick it back up, at least 4Ps across Saturday and Sunday, as part of what I think of as the intellectual dimension of my life.
In an ideal world where money wasn't a constraint, this is exactly what I'd be doing: studying toward my aspiration of contributing to solving neurological problems. That's still the goal. So while I keep working toward financial independence, I'm making room to work toward that aspiration too.