 Hello, I'm Aspen Olstead, I'm an adjunct professor at New York University, and I'm the professor for programming and data structures in C++ Microbatchelors at edX. So the Microbatchelors in programming and data structures really is, if you want to do computer science, this is how you know if you can do computer science. So this is an undergraduate level course, but if you look at every graduate masters in computer science or cybersecurity in our country and other countries, they all require this level of knowledge in computer science as prerequisite. And that tells you something. This is this is the sort of make it or break it of computer science. And so you can get your hands on and learn how to do so and know if it's the right thing for you. So this is a intermediate level undergraduate course. Typically, you would take this potentially in sophomore or junior year in an undergraduate program. You hopefully would have seen a programming course beforehand. So we have an earlier Microbatchelors, which is the computer science fundamentals, which includes a course in Python. It would be great to have that level of programming exposure before you roll up your sleeves and try to write C++. It's not it's not too difficult to do, but it's easier to do if you've seen programming in a language like Python, because it's more powerful than Python. It's less forgiving than Python. So it's nice to start with something simpler in our other Microbatchelors program. So we start you out with what I call procedural programming. Procedural programming is how we programmed in the older days in C, where we didn't use objects. And so the first two courses really teach you a strong foundations in using C++, but really focusing on how you assign values to variables, how you do iterations and programs, how you do decision branching, how you make functions. We also go in quite a bit of depth in the mathematics around programming. So we think about the complexity of functions. After those first two courses, you've now got a strong foundation in C++. We go on to some advanced topics, and this is the data structure side. And the data structure side, we think about data structures. The simplest of those is classes, a class is a way to organize multiple data elements into a larger real life kind of object. So something like a house has many things, it's got many rooms, it may have furniture in those rooms, it may have people in those rooms. So we think of these higher level, abstract data types, classes in the beginning part of the data structures. But then we move on to collections of data. So things like link lists and cues and stacks, which are these fundamental data structures we use to manage multiple pieces of data today. And then we get into some pretty complicated material around trees. And this is the magic of computer science for me. We essentially learn how we balance search trees. And the magic comes with, if you think of some organization like Facebook, that's got a billion members, they need to search those members quickly. A binary search tree that's balanced can do so in 29 comparisons. It can search one billion members in 29 comparisons. That's magic to me. So you learn how to build those data structures and how to search those data structures and how to balance those data structures. You know, I think there's a spectrum of learners that are going to come through this this program and essentially it's going to people who are going to come through and love programming. And so folks like that are going to want to go on to software engineering jobs. And this is enough exposure to prove to an employer that you know how to program. The good and bad news in our society is a lot of folks are working as programmers without a theoretical background. So you're going to have more theoretical background than a lot of people out already working in this room, which will give you a leg up. So those are the people that love it. On the far side of the spectrum are the people are going to say, I don't like programming, but I have the tenacity to finish the microbatch. That tells an employer that you've got tenacity, which is a great strength to show. But you also understand programming by getting through this. So you'll understand how hardware and software works. So all these IT fields where you have to manage software and hardware developed by other people, you'll understand way better. So whether it's cybersecurity, information technology, maybe you're in the software development process as a designer, you're going to understand what those programmers do better. So that spectrum is really a spectrum. You can fall all along it where you may like it a little bit and you may find a piece of that software development lifecycle that a job works really well for you. But this is a strong foundation to go to an employer and show I can program in C++ and I can program data structures. And there's not a lot of people in our society that can do that. So that you're really ready for a lot of the jobs that are out there already. And I encourage you to keep going and learn more, but you're ready to start that process.