Amol has been learning on edX since our very first course was offered in 2012. Back then, online courses helped him learn and explore topics that he didn’t have access to as a high school student in India. And he hasn’t stopped since—he continued taking online courses as an undergraduate at MIT and after he started his career. His commitment to learning and exploring new opportunities recently led him to a new job in fintech.
How He Did It
Amol wanted to explore a wide range of roles in the early stages of his career after he graduated from MIT in 2017. Three years into his first job as a software engineer at Facebook, he started looking at other opportunities. He had developed an interest in finance and completed a couple of online courses in the subject, so he decided to give a few fintech companies a try.
Making the switch to a different industry seemed like an exciting choice and Amol is now a core developer at a fintech company. Though his new role still involves a lot of software engineering, he’s learning and using more finance knowledge as he grows. Changing industries has only reaffirmed his passion for lifelong learning. He continues to spend part of his days learning to keep his knowledge and skills up-to-date in his constantly changing field.
Amol’s Toolkit for Success
Explore Amol’s must-have skills, tips, and recommendations to guide your own journey.
Amol’s Must-Have Skill
How to learn: “The most important skill I acquired was how to learn better. Learning something online requires quite a bit of research, finding the right resources, and figuring out the best ways to stay motivated and actually absorb all the information being taught. Taking online courses led me to come up with a personal project-based study schedule that works really well for me even today.”
Amol’s Top Online Learning Tip
Apply the skills you learn: “I’ve learned that I need to use and apply new skills if I want to retain them for a long time. If whatever I learned on a particular day can immediately be applied, I will try to do that in the context of a project. Sometimes such a project is part of an online course. For example, an artificial intelligence (AI) course I took had a course-long project to create an AI to play Pac-Man.”
Find your motivation: “There have been several times when I started taking a course and I lost the motivation to continue midway. I’ve found that if I am to remain motivated to continue learning, I need to come up with a personal project that needs the skills I would learn. If I’m learning something that will be useful to me in the future, then I’m motivated to finish the course.”
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