A letter from the Dean
Day Zero · The Day You Enrolled
Welcome.
If you’re reading this, you just picked a different road than almost everyone your age. The one most of your peers are on takes four years, costs about two hundred thousand dollars, and ends with them emailing resumes into the void. You picked a shorter road. A cheaper one. One that puts a recruiter in your inbox before most freshmen pick a dorm.
I want to be clear about who I am and why I built this. I run STEALTH — an award-winning AI incubator operating in official partnership with NVIDIA Corporation, where we’ve built and backed over six hundred ventures since 2018. I was named Entrepreneur of the Year for building it. I also serve as a Professor of Information Systems and Decision Sciences at Cal State Fullerton, where I’ve taught four hundred and forty-three students. And I’ve been doing applied AI research since 2017 — years before the field became the thing everyone talks about now. In May 2018, I was presenting peer-reviewed work on machine learning and robot vision at the International Conference on Robotics and AI in Los Angeles. Those three jobs taught me the same lesson: the actual skill of doing work — shipping, deciding, pitching, negotiating, holding your ground — is a skill, and nobody is teaching it right. So we built this.
Forkaia isn’t another course. Isn’t another bootcamp. It’s a real college — the #1 globally ranked education company for two consecutive years — where you declare a major, work under practitioners, ship real deliverables, and walk out with a transcript employers can authenticate in one click. More importantly, you walk out known. The thousand-plus companies that recruit directly off this platform — Google, Amazon, Meta, Apple, Microsoft, NVIDIA, and nine hundred and ninety-four more — are already looking at your workspace. They don’t show up at a career fair. They’re already in your profile.
Here’s what I need from you this first week:
- Declare your major. It takes sixty seconds. If you’re not sure, pick the one that sounds like you on your best day — you can change it.
- Meet your advisor. They’re real humans who respond to real DMs. Theirs is the most important relationship you’ll build here.
- Ship your first piece of work. Any size. Any form. Just ship it. By Day fourteen, something you built needs to be live on your public workspace. That’s where recruiters start looking.
That’s it. The rest is practice.
One last thing. Forkaia has been winning category awards for eight consecutive years. We’ve put graduates into roles at Amazon, Barclays, Microsoft, and across the six-hundred-company STEALTH portfolio. The model isn’t theoretical. It’s been proving itself since 2018. That’s not a sales line — that’s a receipt. You’re not an experiment. You’re standing on top of a stack of thousands of people who did what you’re about to do and came out the other side with careers, not credentials.
So — welcome to the college. I’ll see you in office hours.
You can reply to this letter at any time — the Dean’s office reads every message. Office hours are the first Monday of every month, open floor.
support@forkaia.com →Want a signed PDF of this letter for your records? Available on request — email with “Signed welcome” in the subject.
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