Sometime during my sophomore year, I started writing about things I was learning. Not polished essays—more like extended notes. Half-baked thoughts on mechanism design after a particularly good lecture. Questions I still had about distributed systems after finishing a project. Observations about why certain codebases felt easier to work with than others.

I published these to a blog that maybe three people read, including my mom. It felt slightly embarrassing, like I was pretending to be an expert when I was clearly just a student fumbling through difficult material.

That embarrassment, it turns out, was the point.

The Vulnerability Tax

There’s a psychological cost to publishing your learning process. You’re essentially admitting that you don’t have it all figured out. In an academic environment where everyone performs competence, this feels like weakness.

But I’ve come to think of this discomfort as a tax I pay for accelerated learning. When I know I’m going to write about something, I engage with it differently. I ask more questions. I notice when my understanding is fuzzy instead of glossing over it. I try to articulate ideas precisely, which reveals the gaps in my knowledge that casual thinking hides.

The fear of being wrong in public makes me more careful about being right in private.

Unexpected Connections

The other thing I didn’t anticipate: people respond. Not in huge numbers, but consistently. A PhD student at Stanford emailed me about a post on auction theory to suggest a paper I’d missed. A developer in Berlin offered a different perspective on something I’d written about API design. My professor mentioned that she appreciated seeing how students actually process the material she teaches.

These conversations have been some of the most valuable educational experiences I’ve had at UVA. Not because the people reaching out are famous or important, but because they bring perspectives I couldn’t have found on my own. Learning in public creates surface area for serendipity.

The Quality Question

People sometimes ask if I worry about the quality of what I publish. The honest answer is: yes, constantly. But I’ve made peace with it by thinking about writing in public as a different genre than writing for publication.

Academic papers should be polished and rigorous. Blog posts from a college student learning in real-time should be honest and curious. The goal isn’t to be definitive—it’s to be useful, even if only to my future self trying to remember why I thought something was interesting.

I look back at posts from two years ago and cringe at some of my takes. That cringe is evidence of growth. If I only published things I was certain about, I’d publish almost nothing, and I’d learn slower.

A Practice, Not a Performance

The shift that made this sustainable was thinking of it as a practice rather than a performance. I’m not trying to build an audience or establish myself as a thought leader (a phrase that makes me physically uncomfortable). I’m just thinking out loud, in a place where others can think along with me if they want.

Some weeks I write a lot. Some weeks I write nothing. The consistency isn’t in the output—it’s in the orientation toward learning as something worth sharing, even when incomplete.

If you’re a student considering something similar: just start. Pick a topic you’re genuinely curious about, write what you actually think, and put it somewhere public. The worst case is that nobody reads it and you’ve clarified your own thinking. The best case is that someone reaches out and makes your world a little bigger.