
The “Full Stack Professor” Who Left Academia for the Internet - exolymph
https://grantnissly.com/the-full-stack-professor-who-left-academia-for-the-internet/
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otoburb
It seems that the (summary?) blog on somebody else's infrastructure has been
overwhelmed. So, I tracked down the professor, Justin Murphy, and what seems
to be a series of blog posts[1] about his transition from academia to online
teaching.

[1] [https://theotherlifenow.com/tag/jumping-
ship/](https://theotherlifenow.com/tag/jumping-ship/)

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GrantNissly
Sorry about that! My site went down, but it's back up now. And yes, that's
Justin's blog.

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lumberjack
As a business model it is quite interesting. I don't think the spin of being
an alternative to university is fitting though. It's either a service where
you take classes for fun. I can see that working if marketed to the right
people. Or it is a service where you take classes to improve your skills. I
can see that working too. Lots of people in tech especially want to make the
switch from DevOps to SWE to Data Science to Quant ...etc

As for the whole "professor" thing. A professor does research and a big part
of the appeal of taking their (graduate) classes is to be able to have a
glimpse of the research they do and maybe get an opportunity to work with
them. This seems to be missing here. I am not saying this to downplay the
idea. I actually like the concept.

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jmrphy
Justin here, thanks for your interest. ;-) On the point of professors
attracting grad students interested in seeing and participating in the prof's
work... That's true and it is a major element of what I'm doing. Many of the
people who take my courses do so to stimulate/improve some kind of personal
creative or intellectual project; I write books and such alongside the
courses, and we occasionally discuss strategy, tactics, workflows, etc. So it
is very similar to the working relationships I had with grad students in the
university. The only difference is now my students aren't hoping to land
academic jobs, they just want to do meaningful work and make their dent on the
world through the internet.

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kanobo
I think "Full Stack Academic/Educator" is maybe better title in this case? A
professor is only one part of a large ecosystem and has a very specific role
within academia. When I read "Full Stack Professor" I thought it would be
about a professor who is well-versed at grant writing, research leadership,
mentorship, and research lab setup/management.

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j7ake
A professor also does research, the article seems to only be talking about
providing courses online. Where is the full stack?

Maybe I missed it in the article.

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jmrphy
Yep I write books too. I've only published one short one since leaving
academia a year ago — in part because right now I'm hustling hard on the
business model and infrastructure — but I expect that within a few years I'll
be doing research for about 75% of my time, as "top of funnel" work that
brings people into the courses and the rest. This is a well known business
model, the only thing I'm doing that's new is making the "top of funnel"
content legit disinterested research at a professional level (instead of an
instrumental value proposition, e.g. take my course to earn X more dollars).

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wand3r
Site is down

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kanobo
The subject's google scholar page:
[https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=1dhhMPkAAAAJ&hl=en](https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=1dhhMPkAAAAJ&hl=en)

I wasn't able to find which school he had held his professorship though.

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inetsee
The subject's actual webpage is here [https://theotherlifenow.com/tag/jumping-
ship/](https://theotherlifenow.com/tag/jumping-ship/) Thank you otoburb for
this link.

Third paragraph down in the first section lists "University of Southampton".

