 When I was a kid, I mean when I was a really young kid, my dream job was going to be a garbage man because they get to ride on the back of garbage trucks. Being a garbage man is maybe not the most glamorous thing in the world, so then I set my sights firmly on being a professional baseball player. And that didn't work out. As an undergraduate, I worked at a paper here in Boston doing sports writing. One of the things I was really looking to get out of school was skills that I could apply directly to a job that I was doing, and so much of a four-year undergraduate bachelor's degree is taking history classes and taking sociology classes and taking physics classes and taking things that I had just spent four years doing that kind of thing in high school. I actually was sort of forced to take a break, so my GPA got low enough that I ended up getting put on academic probation. To make ends meet, I ended up having to pick up a second job, working during the day, and so I took a job at a stringed instrument company. It was five days a week at the warehouse, three nights a week at the paper, and then all day Saturday at the paper. It became too much, sort of having both jobs, and that's really when I started to explore going back to school or at least completing my undergraduate education. The on-campus experience, the traditional undergraduate experience wasn't going to work for me. And I ended up finding a really great online program, and so I spent 18 months working during the day and taking online classes in the evening and on the weekends to finish out my bachelor's degree. Finishing my degree online was something that really, really worked for me, and I wanted to help build a company that was going to be bringing that same level of online education out to the whole world. There's a lot of people out there that are not well-served by traditional educational institutions that have a lot of trouble either in the classroom or on campus, people who are working, people who maybe have disabilities or they can't actually get to school, and so that was one of the things that really, really made me excited to work at edX. One of the things that makes me so excited about working on MicroBatchers is this idea of the small, bite-sized courses bundled together to give you those discreet and very clear, obviously applicable pieces of learning that you can take directly into your career, into your day-to-day, and start using everything that you're learning every day on the next day. My name is Ned. I'm a Marketing Project Manager at edX.