While not as completely out-of-the-blue, I also had a similarly sudden realization that I wanted to become a computer scientist. I was in my third year of livi

While not as completely out-of-the-blue, I also had a similarly sudden realization that I wanted to become a computer scientist. I was in my third year of living in Japan at the time, teaching English in a small, conservative town in which I felt isolated and out of place (despite having become mostly fluent with the language). My best friend there had left, ironically inspired by me (or so he had claimed) to leave his country and pursue his dreams abroad, in Australia. I had very little left to offer me in Japan, but I had no idea what else to do; my undergrad in physics had left me with an impressive degree but no marketable skills, certainly none that I still possessed 5 years later. I was in a grocery store in Hamamatsu, listening to one of my favorite podcasts called Skeptically Speaking (now called Science for the People). The episode[0] had a guest named Mark Stevenson, who had written a book exploring the future of various areas of science. At one point he talked about the work of Hod Lipson at Cornell, who had written a program that could investigate data and guess physical equations, and who had also created a robot that taught itself how to walk. I remember him saying that in AI, it's the hard things that are easy, and the easy hard. I remember being so fascinated by this research that I thought, how cool would it be to be involved in this kind of thing? And it was in that moment I decided quite suddenly to become a computer scientist. I went to a dollar store and bought a notebook, went home and immediately went to MIT's opencourseware site and started the watching the lectures of their introductory CS course. Seven months later, I was back in America at grad school, and a year after that I was a full time software developer. I still wonder what might have happened if I hadn't happened to listen to that podcast. [0]: http://www.scienceforthepeople.ca/episodes/an-optimists-tour-of-the-future http://www.scienceforthepeople.ca/episodes/an-optimists-tour...