I’m 40 and Retraining As a Coder to Stay on Top of the AI Wave

• Evrim Kanbur, 40, is retraining and learning coding in the hopes of being an innovator in AI. 
• The former university lecturer has been studying full-time since February via free online courses.
• She says it’s difficult to pivot mid career but wishes more people her age were studying AI.

This as-told-to essay is based on a transcribed conversation with Evrim Kanbur, a 40-year-old former university teacher who is learning to code to work in AI. Business Insider has verified her enrollments, income, and former employment. The following has been edited for length and clarity.

I’ve had a number of different jobs over the years. I’ve been an auditor at Deloitte, a business development manager at Riot Games, and more recently, a lecturer at three different universities in Shanghai, China. 

Having lived in China for 10 years, I’ve seen that websites here are sort of obsolete, people have WeChat apps instead. I realized things were changing rapidly. I knew in order for me to stay ahead, or at least catch up, I should be fluent in AI.

In 2020, I decided to start learning to code. I thought, “if I don’t do this now, when will I?” But I only got serious about it last year. Since February I’ve been studying full-time. I’m retraining to get into the AI industry.

To do it, I made a conscious choice to say no to other things. Saying no meant I had to stop teaching classes on finance, economics, and digital marketing.

To pay bills, I get passive income from online classes I pre-record for the e-learning platform Udemy, which I’ve been doing since 2017. It brings me somewhere between $900 to $3,000 per month. It varies.

Retraining has been quite hard

Retraining is not something that’s easy to do. You have to make sure that you study and retain knowledge. 

It’s like compressing a four-year MIT degree into one intensive year of studying. Aside from learning to code through online classes on edX and Free Code Camp, I’ve been studying programming, computer science, physics and math. 

Those two platforms have courses from Harvard University and MIT and have helped me tremendously. They are both completely free to use and it means I get to learn at my own pace. Ideally, within a year I’ll be ready to start applying for full stack AI developer roles.

I’m 40 and I’m not sure how that’s going to work out in the job market. We’ll see where it’s going to take me, it’s still too early to say, but that’s where I want to go.

Obviously I would want to work for a company like OpenAI, who wouldn’t?

There is also an emotional reason for wanting to get into AI. Growing up, my grandma had dementia. I found myself asking why we still don’t have any solutions or treatments for it.

Instead of just using ChatGPT, I really want to dive deeper into large-language models, how they work and interact with neuroscience principles, so I can find a way to contribute to the neuroscience research field behind dementia.

It might be considered crazy to do it mid-career as all my friends are getting married or their careers are going well. But I want to do this now and I’m happy I’m sticking with it.

I wish there were more people studying coding and programming at my age.