How to Solve It like a Philosopher

Omkar Deshpande is the co-founder of The Young Socratics. An engineer by education, a science buff by hobby, a father of two kids at home, and an aspiring philosopher by heart, Omkar earned a Ph.D in Computer Science from Stanford University after doing interdisciplinary research into human evolutionary genetics and cultural anthropology. He was part of the founding team of engineers at WalmartLabs (through the acquisition of a startup called Kosmix) where he worked for 10 years.

Omkar grew up in India. He got a rank in the top 20 in IITJEE, was the valedictorian of the Computer Science department at IIT Delhi where he did his Bachelors in Computer Science and Engineering, before coming to Stanford for his Masters and Ph.D. But throughout his academic life, he was never motivated by competitions. He believes that the joy of true learning is lost when one focuses on trouncing other people in competitions, and by definition, very few kids can succeed in competitions. It is thus a route filled with anxiety and jealousy for many kids, causing them to lose their self-confidence. Actually, everyone has the potential to fall in love with learning science, engineering and math, and achieve good academic performance as a side effect. Omkar thus offers a different way of approaching these subjects. Most recently, he is building high-quality computer science courses at Interview Kickstart, where he heads the curriculum, and has helped more than 12000 engineers become better at computational problem solving, and crack technical software engineering interviews as a side effect.