But there's a thought that sat next to the pride the whole time, and I haven't been able to shake it.
She spent years training for a particular path while the ground under a lot of careers (mine included) is shifting faster than any university can adjust for.
Someone starts a four or five year program, sometimes longer, and pays real money for it, much more in the US than here in Canada. By the time they walk across the stage, the thing they trained for has been reorganized by AI in ways nobody could have put on a syllabus when they enrolled.
That gap between how long it takes to learn something formally and how quickly the ground moves is the scary part, and schools are slow to close it almost by design.
I don't think the degree was a mistake, far from it. I think the math underneath degrees has quietly gotten more dangerous though. Degrees have indeed been having a case of the diminishing returns lately.
What Actually Transferred
I came up a different way. I've been building things online since 2005, and no degree drove any of it, really.
What moved me forward was shipping work where people could actually see it, and then, as the years went on, explaining that work to other people who wanted to do the same.
The resume that mattered for me was never a credential. It was a trail of things I'd made and a growing pile of writing about how I made them.
When someone decided to trust me with a job or a purchase, they were responding to that evidence, not the paper. That's been true for twenty years and it's more true now than it's ever been.
I want to be careful here though, because this slides easily into a dumb argument.
Plenty of fields truly require formal education, and I'd like my surgeon to have finished medical school and engineers building bridges to have a degree. Learning matters enormously. The narrow claim is that in tech specifically, demonstrated work tends to outrun the credential, and the ability to explain that work tends to outrun both.
The Thing We Keep Saying
Brett (my co-founder on DailyPhotoTips) and I have said the same sentence to each other more times than I can count.
We're more interested in the teaching than the topic itself.
We both love photography and that's of course real. It's where we met as collaborators and the subject we've spent the most years inside. Over a decade actually.
But the part we actually light up about is the act of making someone understand something they couldn't do yesterday. The photography is almost incidental to that feeling.
What we love is the click on the other person's face when a concept lands. Before photography, I spent about 7-8 years writing about and teaching design and web development, and prior to that I spent years teaching guitar.
The tell is that I could do probably it with anything.
I've realized that I can be put in front of someone who wants to learn guitar and I get the same pull. Same with a dev concept, or some weird corner of how the web works, or any other subject I know well enough to break down. The specific subject changes nothing about the underlying pleasure, which is watching understanding move from my head into someone else's and knowing I helped it get there.
That took me a strange amount of time to admit, because the culture tells you the passion is supposed to be for the subject.
You're meant to love photography, or love code, and the teaching is supposed to be a thing you do on the side of the love. For me it runs the other way. The teaching is the love, and the subject is just the vehicle I happen to be driving that day.
Why The Vehicle Doesn't Matter
Once you see teaching as the actual craft, the credential question looks different.
If the subject is a vehicle, then subject knowledge is the swappable part. The thing worth having underneath is the ability to learn something well enough to make it clear to another person.
That skill does not care what the topic is. It transferred for me from music to photography to software to writing, because it was never really about any of them.
And here's the part that should worry the credential system.
A model can now generate a competent explanation of almost any settled topic, which means knowing the topic is worth less than it used to be. Knowing how to learn a new thing quickly and pass it on to someone who needs it is worth more.
A degree mostly certifies the subject layer, the part that's getting cheaper. The learning-how-to-learn underneath, the part that's actually getting more valuable, is the part school rarely grades and AI doesn't threaten (yet).
I'm not saying skip the education. Absolutely not. I'm saying the transferable asset was hiding under the subject the whole time, and we've been handing out certificates for the wrong layer.
Twenty Years Of Doing It
I've been teaching online in one form or another for two decades now. It started with articles and grew into ebooks, then into webinars and full courses, spanning photography and development and whatever else I happened to know enough to explain.
I'm not listing that to wave it around. I'm listing it because the sheer volume taught me something I couldn't have learned any other way.
Trying to teach a thing exposes whether you actually understand it.
You can do something well on autopilot for years, running on instinct and muscle memory, and never once be forced to know why it works. The moment you have to explain it to a beginner though, every gap in your understanding lights right up.
The questions they ask are the ones you stopped asking yourself a decade ago, and half the time you realize you don't have a clean answer.
So the teaching was never only an output. It was the thing that forced the real understanding in the first place.
Every article and course made me better at the actual subject, precisely because I had to dismantle what I knew and rebuild it in a form someone else could pick up.
The topics rotated over the years. The teaching stayed, and it kept sharpening everything it touched.
Back To The Graduate
Which brings me back to my stepdaughter and the stage she just walked across.
If she asked me what she actually earned, I wouldn't point at the degree. I'd point at the proof underneath it.
She showed she can take something truly difficult, sit with it for years, and come out the other side understanding it. That capacity is the real asset. It transfers to whatever the next three years decide to reorganize, in a way the specific subject of her degree might not.
The credential was never the point, and honestly the subject was never the point either. The thing she proved she can do is learn hard things and make them hers.
Nobody can automate that out from under her, and no shift in the ground can take it back.
That's the part worth being proud of, and it happens to be the only part that was ever going to last.