I'm a software engineer who took a 6-year break from the field for mental health reasons. When I came back, I found an industry that had been transformed by AI — and a skills gap I needed to close before I could build what I actually wanted to build.
So I built a doctoral-level self-study curriculum. Here's what that actually looks like.
The curriculum
phd-applied-ai is 67 modules across 6 phases:
Phase 0 — Math foundations: Linear algebra, calculus, probability, statistics, information theory






