Hey guys, welcome to ask Professor Dave. In the
first installment of this series, we went over the question of my ethnicity, as so
many of you wanted to know about that, and today I want to address another
question that I get very frequently. It regards my career background and
educational background. A lot of you want to know where I went to school and what
I studied, and a lot of you want to know if I currently teach in the flesh, and if
so, where. And furthermore, a lot of you asked very incredulously, are you a
real professor? So I wanted to knock out all of these all at once, and just sort
of give you a quick summary of my my life and career since college. So as you
might remember from the first Ask Professor Dave, I told you about how my
parents emigrated from Italy. They stopped up in Canada for a little bit
for graduate studies, and then they came to New York State where I was born, and
soon after that we moved to Connecticut. So that's where I grew up from age four all
the way through high school. I was living in Connecticut, and you know, not really
doing a whole lot. But then I went to Minnesota for college. I went to a
liberal arts school called Carleton College, which is a really great place.
And while I was there, I got a bachelor's degree in chemistry, so here's here's me
looking real tough in the cold, cold winter. And immediately after that I went over
to California. I went to UC Santa Cruz to do a master's program in synthetic
organic chemistry, but I didn't really last long. I dropped out in my second
semester. I wanted to move up to San Francisco and play music, so I was there
a couple years playing in some different bands, and all the while I was supporting
myself with substitute teaching and tutoring jobs, you know that sort of
thing, and then I moved down to Los Angeles, again for for music
opportunities, and when I first got here I was doing a lot of teaching jobs, a lot
of tutoring, private high schools, things like that, but I eventually got this
teaching job for organic chemistry at this little trade university here in the
LA area, and actually it was a pretty lucky break because with the bachelor's
degree I was only supposed to teach the laboratory portion. But on the first day
the lecture instructor had this freak out, he just took off, and so my boss came
up to me and he said, look, you gotta go teach the lecture because there's
nobody here. So I taught the lecture for that semester, and then the following
semester I taught the second, the organic 2 course as well, and I did a
good job for both of those, students seemed to respond well, so they offered
me the job permanently, but contingent on me getting a master's at the same time.
So I went over to Cal State Northridge to give a second shot at a
master's degree in chemistry. And I did that for a few years, I was researching
and studying over at CSUN, and all the while teaching this organic chemistry
course, which I did for a few years, so I think about eight times I taught the
course. So I really honed that material, I got good at explaining that
material, but through a bunch of bureaucracy quite frankly, I lost that
job and and along with it the funding for my master's program, so I had to
withdraw yet again from the master's program. But I didn't want
these lectures to evaporate into the ether, I wanted them to remain in some
tangible form, even if I wasn't going to be teaching there anymore, so I decided
to record them to camera just as I would be speaking to my class and put them
online. And that was the birth of Professor Dave Explains. So that was a
little less than three years ago, and I chose the name really without much
thought. It was kind of tongue-in-cheek to be honest, I just thought it'd be fun
to have like a little persona, you know, Professor Dave, it's just, you know, a
little name. And so that was it, that was the first stuff, the organic chemistry
stuff was the first that I did, which you can probably tell, I mean it's just me
reciting lectures to camera essentially from memory, but people responded well
they really liked that stuff and so I decided to do general chemistry. But this
time I wanted to spice it up with animations and things, and people
responded well to that too, so after that I became obsessed. I just really
wanted to create as much content as possible, you know, cover as many subjects
as possible with the limit of really covering everything there is to know, and
I'm back in school for a third attempt at a master's degree, this time in
science education, so it's a little bit different, and I'll be done in the spring.
But to be honest, I really don't have any desire to go back to teaching after that
because I'm doing this full-time. I sit literally in this room like 60 to 70
hours a week pumping this content out for you guys, and and I love doing it. I
really hope to to grow as a communicator and find new opportunities to help the
world understand science. So if you like this channel and would like for me to
continue doing what I do, I really sincerely hope that you will consider
supporting me on patreon, as I really do not earn very much from YouTube and it's
very important to me that all of my content remains free, always, for all of
you guys, so any contribution there would would help me a lot to do that, but
failing that if you could just subscribe to the channel and tell all your friends
to do the same, that would help a lot. So that's it for today's Ask Professor Dave,
I gotta get back to animating some math and biology stuff for you guys, so I'll
see you next time.