I started college as a mathematician, my budding interest in philosophy having
been squelched by a bad experience with a high school class.  When I took a
100-level East/West philosophy class in college, it affirmed two things: that I
was as dissatisfied as ever with the pageantry of social intellectualism, but
also that however tiresome the classroom became I could not stop thinking about
the material.  When I signed up for a seminar class the next semester it was a
slippery slope---I was a philosophy minor for about a week, and having mostly
finished with my math studies I quickly declared a double major.

As I hurried to catch up on lost time I found my faith in math, which had
colored my philosophical opinions up until then, eroded just as quickly as did
my interest in studying it further.  Exact answers, long my bread and butter,
now only pointed back to the assumptions to which they were equivalent.  As I
graduated I was just getting into Modern philosophy, and left college stuck in
the problems of the Cartesian world-view.

DesCartes is a tempting starting point for philosophy, moreso if one is a
mathematician.  So much of our culture is rooted there, and there is such a
strong connection between his mathematical and philosophical ideas, that it can
be hard to find fault in his conclusions.  I needed to put my hands in the dirt
and figure out whether there was any understanding to be had outside of his
system.

The next years were predictably disorienting, but I had been certain that
graduate school was the wrong choice.  I had a lot of work to do on my own
before I felt ready to study further.  Working as a swimming instructor, I
worked on teaching skills and designed my own swimming curriculum while
spending my spare time reading Rorty, Baudrillard, and Heidegger.  A colleague
at Linfield was especially focused on Heidegger, and his perspective had always
given me a fresh one, so I hunkered down to study Being and Time, making a
summary as I went.  This is probably the most important thing I've ever done,
giving me a new perspective on philosophy and a new appreciation for the act of
study.

Following this new passion I began to find more causes, more interests, and
more gaps in my knowledge.  I spent years trying to fill them on my own,
divorced as I was from any academic community, before realizing it was time to
go back to school.  I wrote a new paper to demonstrate the progress I had made,
and a professor at a college near where I worked helped me revise it and
allowed me to sit in on his course on Continental philosophy, even letting me
lecture on Heidegger when the time came.  It was the most at home I had felt
since college, and I now feel more excited than ever to plunge into graduate
study.

Now, having been studying Heidegger for several years on my own, I feel a
familiar pang of worry that perhaps I'm being too narrow-minded, that perhaps
I've believed the same thing for too long.  I've argued from ignorance enough
times that I know I need to be confronted with counterarguments and put through
my paces to reinforce or reinvent my understanding of the world.