The connections that he made in his Masters program led to him founding a security company with his professors and landed government contracts through their contacts in the federal government. That infosec company is one of the most competitive/exciting local employers.
Writing, Journalism, Fashion, Fine-Arts, Film - all of these master programs are producing legions of high-debt students with bad prospects, which is the point of the original article that the start of the Twitter thread.
Even journalism schools when they first started, weren't bathing in the cache of a MFA program, they were trade schools for making reporters. They taught you bare bones shit about writing a column to set lines, and had you interning at newspapers and shadowing reporters right away. MFA programs and the rise of "creative non-fiction" are now making journalists think they're artists.
I don't have a problem with MFA programs existing (I mean, some CS programs are awful and churn out students who can barely code), but I think some applicants need to take a hard look at whether they even serve a purpose for their future employment beyond the letters "MFA" after your name; and, whether Columbia is actually the best MFA program to go to.
I don't know if I'd do it today given how expensive it has gotten. But it made sense when I went there a decade ago.
In other words it’s not what you know but who you know and the key is to know people who know other people who can get you that sweet sweet tax payer funded government money. Not to get political but that’s why you had Trump’s son in law and daughter working in the White House and Biden’s kid went straight from rehab to $10M contracts with the government of China to selling his art for $500k a pop.
The DARPA money and contracts were well-deserved and exactly the sort of research that government money should be going to.