Lessons Learned: Scott Gifford's Insights on Deepening Understanding and Continuous Learning

Victors in Grad School

Welcome back to another episode of the Victors in Grad School podcast! I'm your host, Dr. Christopher Lewis, and today we have a fantastic guest joining us. Scott Gifford, a Principal Engineer at Amazon, will be sharing his journey through graduate school and his success in the field of computer science. Scott started his academic career at the University of Michigan Flint, where he obtained his Bachelor of Science in Computer Science. After gaining valuable industry experience, he made the decision to further his education and earned a Master's degree from the University of Michigan in Computer Science. In this episode, we'll dive into Scott's experiences, the benefits he gained from pursuing a graduate degree, and the unexpected lessons he learned along the way. Join us as Scott reflects on his time at the University of Michigan and shares valuable insights for current and future students. Get ready for another inspiring episode of "Victors in Grad School"!

This podcast is brought to you by The Office of Graduate Programs at the University of Michigan-Flint. If you’re still wondering about other things to consider when it comes to graduate school, you can also contact the Office of Graduate Programs at UM-Flint. We’re here to answer questions Monday – Friday from 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. EST. You can also find out more about the 50+ programs that the university has to offer here.

Transcript

Christopher Lewis:

Welcome to the Victors in Grad School where we have conversations with students, alumni and experts about what it takes to find success in graduate school. Welcome back to Victors in grad school. I'm your host, dr. Christopher Lewis, director of Graduate Programs for the University of Michigan, Flint. Really excited to have you back again this week. Thanks so much for being here because, you know, every week we have an opportunity to talk with one another about the journey that you're on. You may just be thinking about grad school, you may already be in grad school and looking at that light at the end of the tunnel or at some other point in that graduate school process. And I love being able to talk to you and share the stories of others as they have gone before you. And that's what we do. Every week I bring you a different guest, someone new that has gone to graduate school, has experienced graduate school, has learned from that experience both positive and negative about the journey and about what it took to find success. And that's what this show is all about. This week we've got another great guest with us. Scott Gifford is with us and Scott is a Principal Engineer at Amazon, but he did his bachelor's degree at the University of Michigan Flint getting a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science and then went on from there to get a Master's degree from the University of Michigan in Computer Science. So we're going to be talking to him about his own journey and learn a little bit more about his success in that as well. Scott, thanks so much for being here today.

Scott Gifford:

Dr. Lewis, thank you so much for having me on your show. I'm really excited to be here. I really loved my experience at U of Influent and so I'm excited to get to talk to you about it and talk to potential future or current or other students there. That was such a great part of both my learning and then also my personal growth and my social life and stuff like that. So excited to have a chance to be talking to you and be thinking about my days at Urban Flint.

Christopher Lewis:

So let's turn the clock back in time. I want to go back because I know you did your undergraduate work at the University of Michigan Flint and at some point during that period of time it might have been during undergrad, but you also went on from there and worked and you were able to get a job and worked after getting your bachelor's degree. But at some point you made a decision that you needed to go further or wanted to go further and get that additional education and get that master's degree. What was going through your head and what made you decide that you wanted to take that next step?

Scott Gifford:

Well, so like you said, I got my undergraduate degree at U of M flint. I got a Bachelor's of Science in computer science. I went out and got a job at an early Internet provider in the area the Internet ramp and was able to reach the end of that and had some money in the bank. And I have always really valued education. I really enjoyed being in school. I really valued the things that I learned in school. And so when I had the ability financially to do so, kind of as a reward to myself for the success of my first serious job, I decided I was going to go get a master's degree. So I did it because I enjoy learning, because I enjoyed that experience, because I wanted to have it. But it's really benefited me professionally in a lot of ways, some of which I expected and some of which I didn't expect.

Christopher Lewis:

Let's talk a little bit about that. You said that there were some things that you expected and didn't expect and you benefited in different ways. Talk to me about what you learned along the way and what you truly did benefit from that experience.

Scott Gifford:

There were a couple of things that were interesting. So one of the things that I expected is that when I went in to get my master's degree, I really deepened my understanding of a lot of core things in computer science. And part of what I think made my experience so great was that I worked for quite a while, probably almost ten years, before I went back to school. And so I really appreciated the chance to be in school and focused in an environment where I could just learn instead of trying to do my job and learn a little bit on the side, just focus on learning. And I really appreciated the value of being able to put the things I learned in industry context. And so it was fun when I was in a seminar class to be able to stick my hand up and say, oh, actually, when I was working in industry, here's where we found this useful and here's how this worked out in practice. And so deepening my understanding was one of the ways that I expected it to help me, and it did. And one of the unexpected ways was it kind of reminded me how big the world is out there in terms of things to learn and things to know. And it humbled me a little bit in a good way. Like, honestly, I went into graduate school a little bit of a know it all and felt like I kind of knew everything already. And then in the process of doing that and meeting a lot of other students who were smarter than me in many ways and a lot of professors who were way smarter than me in lots of ways, it kind of humbled me in a very useful way. And it made me realize that I wasn't going to just learn everything. I needed to learn how to keep learning and continually learn to be successful and to accomplish the things that I want. So those were kind of the two broadest lessons that I learned overall while I was there.

Christopher Lewis:

Now, I know that I mentioned that you decided to go to the University of Michigan to get that Master's degree. I'm sure that you could have gone to other places and gone and got that degree at other institutions. What made you decide to go to the University of Michigan and get your Master's degree there?

Scott Gifford:

It's a great question. So I really had valued my Michigan education from U of M Flint, and at the time I went U of Mflint didn't have a graduate program or I would have considered that. I think really, I didn't really consider going anywhere else because I had been so satisfied with my undergraduate education. And it really felt like a continuation of that. It felt like taking what I had started when I was younger and just finishing it. I didn't have a specific need. I didn't necessarily need to get a Master's degree. And so, honestly, if I hadn't gone to U of M, I probably would have just done something else. I probably would have just gone back and gotten the job. But that was what I wanted to do, was get a Master's degree from U of M and Arbor. And so that's what I did.

Christopher Lewis:

Now, as you were going through that graduate degree, you found success, you finished, you graduated, you've continued in your career and have flourished in your career. So talk to me about as you made that transition from work into that Master's degree and had to change from your mindset of being an undergraduate student to a graduate student. What did you have to do to set yourself up for success and what did you have to do to maintain that success as you went through the entire graduate school journey?

Scott Gifford:

Something that I think did set me up for success in grad school was my experience at U of M Flint as a smaller school for undergrad. So I was already pretty accustomed to sticking my hand up and asking questions of professors because our classes were small enough that I could do that. I was already pretty accustomed to just swinging by a professor's office with a question or an idea. I wanted to bounce off them because Unflinton had a small enough campus that I knew all my professors well and had relationships with them when I could do that. And so a lot of the other students that I saw there struggled with that a little bit. They saw this big distance between them and the professors, and it made it hard for them to really engage like the graduate student should. Because to me, that was the big difference was you get a lot more of this direct one on one attention from professors, and you can learn directly from them and ask them specific questions about what you want to learn and how you want to direct your studies versus just going through a course of curriculum. So I feel like that made me very well prepared. I think the two things that really made me successful there, one was staying pretty well organized. I'm not an organized person by nature at all and so I have to kind of make my weakness my strength. At the time, I had a binder with a calendar and all my notes and I kept track of everything and when to do it and stuff like that. And just being well organized is something that's hard for me, but it was something that's worth doing and it was important to me to make it through that. The other thing was to really focus on it and appreciate it. I was glad that I didn't have a lot of other responsibilities at the time because I was able to just go into a lecture and focus all my attention on a lecture and not being thinking about 100 other things I have to do or being distracted by other things. I felt like when I went back to get my master's degree, I really appreciated that I was able to be in a classroom with somebody whose job it was to teach me stuff rather than trying to beg, borrow and steal knowledge like you do in the work world. And so really just sitting back and focusing and enjoying that and focusing all my attention on it, paying a lot more attention to it than I frankly did in undergrad where I was often sort of half paying attention and letting my mind wander in classes. So I really learned a lot just by staying focused on things and paying attention to what was going on and asking good questions, I guess was the other thing that I think made me successful, asking good questions when I didn't understand. And often those good questions led to further conversations with the professors, sometimes led to relationships. Actually my first job after grad school was as a research programmer at the university and so that was developed by the relationships I had with professors by asking them questions and stopping by their office hours and stuff like that.

Christopher Lewis:

Appreciate you sharing that because definitely those are some of the things you definitely have to do. And you mentioned the fact that you're not organized and you had to put some things in place. What did you have to actually do? What are some of the steps that you had to set up for yourself to make sure that you are going to be more organized through that process? Or what did you have to do to force yourself to be more organized in that process?

Scott Gifford:

Really the key thing for me was to think about the organization as a first class concern, like to sit back and make a plan for how I was going to stay organized. Now, the plan that I actually had was to buy a binder and put a calendar in the binder and put separators between all of my classes and keep everything in one place and organize it that way. Probably I would do something a little bit more high tech now, right? That was probably 25 years ago or something, right? So a binder with removable pages in a calendar felt pretty high tech. Now I would probably use a phone or an iPad or something to keep track of that, like I do for work. But really just thinking about whenever something important comes out, knowing that I was not going to remember this if I didn't take some step. And so thinking, what step can I take to make sure I remember that? And really just in my undergrad, I would just try my best to remember things. And honestly, I was a little younger then, so I did remember things a little bit better. But in grad school, I found that you weren't constantly getting reminded of things, right? Your professors respected you a bit more or respected me a bit more as an adult who could manage my own time and priorities. And so they would just tell me something was due in two months and expect that I would remember that. And so just making sure I thought about that date as like a first class thing to keep track of and working back from that date and how am I going to coordinate with my teammates on a group project and stuff like that. Just really thinking about scheduling as one of the primary concerns instead of just like saying, oh, I'll just do it as an afterthought, it'll probably work out.

Christopher Lewis:

Now, I know that, as you said, it's been a number of years since you got that graduate degree. And as you think back to that graduate education and look at the work that you're doing now with Amazon, do you feel that that graduate degree prepared you for the work that you do on a daily basis?

Scott Gifford:

So I use the things I learned in that graduate degree every day more so at this stage in my career. So my role here at Amazon in Detroit is the principal engineer. And the role that I have is to make sure that we're building sort of cohesive architectures where we have hundreds of different teams at Amazon building things. And so I work with about 20 of them and making sure they're all building things that will make sense and work together. And so I need to be able to very quickly drop into some system I haven't seen before and advise teams on whether it's likely to work or not in the end. And so the broad knowledge that I got in my master's degree of algorithms and data structures lets me very quickly analyze those systems, jump in and say where I think they're going to perform well, where I think they're not going to perform well. The deep knowledge I got of databases is something I use every day. Thinking about data management, understanding how we need to store the petabytes and petabytes and petabytes of data, probably exabytes of data that we have here at amazon. How? We need to arrange the parts of the data that I'm responsible for to make sure that we can process them later in an effective way. Use things from the operating systems class that I took just to reason about what's going on under the hood when a program is running, or to look at an architecture and be able to visualize all the way down. To the operating system layer what's going on? And then to be able to use the hardware class I took to visualize what's going on with the processor. Just having the right mental model where I can take a system I'm looking at, read a description of it and then quickly visualize in my head what are the data structures and algorithms that are here, what are the data access patterns, how is this going to interact with the operating system? How is that going to work with the hardware below it? Being able to quickly have that insight and having a framework to plug new knowledge into is probably the way that it's been most helpful to me.

Christopher Lewis:

So as you look back at your graduate education, you think about your younger self even before you got into graduate school. Are there things that you wish that someone would have told that would have helped you to find success sooner?

Scott Gifford:

Yes, there's one very specific example that comes to mind, is that at my very first job, we had a problem where you would press a button to manage an issue in our support queue in software that I had written, and 90% of the time it would work, and the other 10% of the time it wouldn't work. And I had no idea why, and eventually just had to create a way to delete those things that were stuck because they couldn't get out and we didn't know what to do about it. Well, one of my first graduate school classes I took, I guess probably it was my second year, was about parallel computing and learned about concurrency and learned about race conditions. And I had a bit of an AHA moment where I said that's what happened to me five years ago is there was a race condition but I didn't know what that was. I didn't have the right mental framework to be able to think about it. So that's a very specific example. More generally, I would have benefited from kind of the humility that came from being in a larger world and being a little bit less of a know it all earlier in my career, being a little bit more willing to go out and ask questions and learn more and go in depth versus assuming that I already knew the answer. And lots of things that I learned myself in my spare time about operating systems, about hardware, about networking, about databases, a lot of those things early in my career, I kind of learned in the school of hard knocks, right? You create a database and it doesn't work, and you don't know why, and so you go Google for why isn't it working? And you learn about indexes and data structures and efficient access patterns and stuff like that. Those are all things I learned in advance in graduate school, right? And so if I had gone into my first job with that set of knowledge where I could plug new facts into and the right frame of reference for all of these things and even really properly understanding like each of these is a complex field of study on its own. I think I would have been able to approach problems more analytically. And instead I approached them a little bit ad hoc. Something would go wrong with a system I was responsible for, and I might have to pull an all nighter to figure out what was wrong with it and get it back and running. Whereas after my graduate career, it was a little bit easier for me to sit back analytically, spend some time thinking, and say, I have a hypothesis about what this is, and here's how I think we can fix it, versus just throwing everything at the wall and seeing what it stuck.

Christopher Lewis:

Also, as we finish up today, as you think about graduate school and you think about the journey that you went on specifically, is there any advice that you would give to other students, whether they're going for a graduate degree in computer science or just a graduate degree in general that you would put out there that would help them to again find success during that graduate school journey.

Scott Gifford:

I guess I'd have a couple of pieces of advice. One is it's fun and it's not ten times harder than an undergraduate degree. I felt like a lot of people I talked to think, oh, I could never do that. I would never go back and do that. I've been working for too long. I could never get back into school mode. But I found it was pretty easy and actually pretty enjoyable to go from work mode back to school mode. And I really appreciate it a lot more after having been in industry. So if it's something if you're mid career and thinking about going back and getting a master's degree, I think that's very doable. I think lots of people do that successfully. And I felt like I was able to use my skills from the work world to be more successful as a later graduate student than many of the students that I saw who came directly from undergrad and maybe hadn't learned the organizational skills and didn't have the right context to really know how stuff would apply. I think the other thing I would say is sit back and enjoy it. It was an enjoyable experience and I really learned the most when I sat back and paid attention to what professors were saying, engaged in a conversation with them, asked questions, used the office hours, just really took advantage of all the things that were available. Use the graduate library, right, which is one of the best technical resources available. And just really take advantage of the fact that you have access to the resources of a really great institution, including its professors, in a way. That you'll really never have again after that experience because you have a group of people whose job it is to impart knowledge and wisdom to you. And after that, in your career, you'll find that, like I said earlier, you have to sort of beg, borrow and steal that knowledge and try to find good mentors who will teach you what they've learned and stuff like that. So it's a unique opportunity to just really focus on learning and deepening your knowledge. And the more you take advantage of all the stuff available versus just trying to figure out what's the minimum you can do to get through, I think the more that you benefit from it later.

Christopher Lewis:

Well, Scott, I just want to say thank you. Thank you for sharing your own story today, for sharing your own journey, and I wish you all the best.

Scott Gifford:

Thank you, Dr. Lewis, for having me on. I really appreciate it. I really enjoyed talking to you and thanks for giving me a chance to relive some of my great memories. From U of M Flint and from.