In May, I moved out to NYC to attend NYU Stern's Tech MBA program. This is my first stint of unemployment since college (around 6.5 years!) so it's been a nice mental reset. The first couple weeks felt like a vacation, and I still had work-related thoughts in the back of my mind. About a month in, I started forgetting those usual routines (ongoing projects, our roadmap, recurring meetings) and realized that I had more mental space / energy to work on myself.

The Tech MBA is a 1-year program, where the summer term is an accelerated session of all the traditional MBA courses: accounting, finance, econ, marketing, leadership, communications, etc. It was actually quite busy with classes from 9am - 4:30pm M-Th, and half day Fridays. It's been fun to go back into student mode and cover new topics, and I now have a better appreciation for what my former colleagues in Accounting and Finance teams were talking about. Between classes and summer travel (I was still flying back west about once a month for various events), the summer flew by. Also, NYC is HOT & HUMID. I've been sweating non-stop and it's physically draining. I miss the mild SF weather.

The theme of the summer though has been AI. It's been nice to step outside the Amazon ecosystem and use 'external' tools on a day-to-day basis. I was feeling behind the curve while at work, and have used this time to explore tools. By this point, I am using AI on a daily basis with Perplexity / Gemini replacing most of my web searches. It's astonishing how quickly these tools are progressing. At the start of summer we learned about things like NotebookLM and Gamma, and now, almost all class presentations are AI generated and HBS Cases are converted into bite sized podcasts for faster consumption. Our Data Analytics class was also taught as AI first, and ended up being Gemini generating most of the code in our Google Collab notebooks. I am concerned about the future of knowledge work. NotebookLM's capabilities of synthesizing multiple resources with "critical thinking" to produce reports in particular was mindboggling, and makes me question what skills humans can bring to the table -- creativity, taste?

Still, they are undeniably helpful when used with good intentions. For my classwork I do what I call "vibe studying": upload notes/slides to Perplexity and ask it to break down and explain topics so I can build intuition. AI is an ever-patient tutor that you can ask an unlimited amount of questions, and have it personalize explanations using analogies that make sense to you. The newer 'Study' modes are also great for working through problem sets, they help you think through problems step by step without giving answer -- it's basically a reverse Uno card where AI is prompting me with Chain of Thought.

Being in school at this moment is interesting, and I'm glad I chose a 1-year program. This time has given me the opportunity to take a step back and survey how the market and tech industry is evolving. At the same time, things seem to be moving so quickly that it's hard to project what the world will look like next Spring when I'm back on the job market. The best course of action right now is to keep exploring and learning.