I enjoy stories about people who’ve found unusual paths to success in life, business, education, nutrition, fitness, etc.

In the below video, a guy named Scott Young tells how he completed the entire curriculum (including exams) for a four-year computer sciences degree at MIT using free online curriculum. And how his only expenses were the cost of four school years worth of the text books (less than $2,000). Oh, and this is where it gets really interesting: he did it in one year.

Yes, that’s right … he did four years of course work in one year! Now that, my friends, is ambitious. And it’s damn sure unconventional. And it’s awesome. And I had to post about it.

You see MIT and many other colleges and universities like Harvard and Stanford are now putting a lot of their course work and curriculum online. MIT’s is right here. They have 2,100 courses available at your fingertips. Talk about democratizing education!

So check out this guy’s story of how he leveraged the content to get an incredible education over 12 short months. It’s just 12 minutes long and well worth your time.

Wil

P.s. Here’s Scott’s web site. He blogged about the experience as he went through it.

P.p.s. The internet is such an amazing, powerful tool. From enabling Schedulefly to exist as a business to enabling Scott Young to do what he did to giving anybody with a laptop/tablet/smartphone/etc., an internet connection, and a little drive and creativity and ingenuity the ability to control their own destiny in so many ways. (I feel a whole other blog post hatching so I better stop typing now…)