Alumni Spotlight: Peter House
Peter House (Mathematics major, Philosophy minor 鈥�07) understands numbers more than most people. He sees his time at UAA as truly transformative in his life, noting that he was the first in his family to obtain a college degree.While his story is unique he鈥檚 quick to say that he is just 1 out of 100,000 who have had their lives transformed during their time at UAA. (That number might be closer to 70,000, but who鈥檚 counting?) Although Peter鈥檚 journey wasn鈥檛 a standard 4-year timeline, he spent his days at UAA gaining a deep understanding of learning and study strategies. That time served him well. He鈥檚 since used his degree to work in several technology jobs before starting his own IT consulting and digital security company. Deeptree Inc. is a growing small business with offices in Wasilla, Anchorage, and Great Falls, Montana, and currently employs 16 people.
Peter has overcome many challenges in his life, including a traumatic brain injury in 2016 that had a serious impact on his cognitive abilities, including his ability to read. While continuing to run his small business, Peter began to re-examine his life and what truly mattered to him. Learning and language were at the forefront.
Connecting back to his collegiate days, Peter took up French 鈥� a subject he studied at UAA, but now wanted to master. While simultaneously re-learning how to read, Peter taught himself French by using Pimsleur, Duolingo, and working French into his conversations when possible. 鈥淟earning French has been a truly rewarding experience,鈥� says Peter, 鈥淚t鈥檚 connected me with people from around the world, and helped me discover Francophiles throughout 麻豆无码版.鈥�
We were lucky to sit down with Peter to discuss his business, his involvement and philanthropy to the Mathematics Department, and his thoughts on the value UAA brings to our community.
Why did you choose UAA?
Going to UAA was a dream come true because I was the first in my family to graduate with a degree. UAA, of course, has probably launched 10,000 or 100,000 such stories over its lifetime, and I happen to be one of them, right?
But, you know, I was in and out for a couple of years. And then something would happen, things would come off the rails, and frankly, I was just young and did not have the full equipment to deal with such trauma. I dealt with a lot of trauma 鈥� I'll just leave it at that. But one of the things that was really special, really exquisite about my experience at UAA was the level of investment in student success that the professors had.
If there is anything I want people to know about the UAA experience, it鈥檚 that you will never find an undergraduate university that has as much investment in the success of their undergraduate students as UAA. I'm not original in saying this, but it is true.
I think about Dr. Davies, she's retired now, but was the Mathematics department head while I was there. I don't know what she had for breakfast, but she just had an infinite level of energy and was a sharp mathematician. I remember bumping into her somewhere, and she was so interested in what I had going on. She invited me to return to the program and said 鈥渨e'd love to see you back鈥�. After that, I thought to myself, 鈥淚 need to be enrolled.鈥� It took me a number of years to get through the program because I wasn't a standard four-year student, but graduating with my degree in mathematics was a life-changing event. It gave me a certain level of competency, of course, but confidence as well.
Are there any moments that really stand out to you from your time at UAA?
One of my favorite experiences was with Dr. Kamal Narang. It鈥檚 something I鈥檝e carried with me through my life, and it's helped me. When you're a student, you never know what moments are going to catch you.
There's an equation called the most beautiful theorem in the world: e i 蟺 + 1 = 0. This is an exquisite equation because it has two of the most important integers, 1 and 0. Very important. And then you've got two irrationals. You've got e and you've got pi. Then you have an imaginary number, i, which is the square root of negative 1. And I remember Dr. Narang came in and set about proving this. It was complex analysis, and it was mathematical poetry. All of us in the class were just agape as he was crossing things off and canceling each other out. He was substituting identities, trigonometric identities.
And then he turned around at the end of the proof, and he said something that changed me forever. It鈥檚 something that I carry with me to this day because it's something I remember in challenging moments. He said, 鈥淓verything I did, you know how to do already. The difference between me and you is that I had the confidence to try.鈥�
Do you want to talk a little bit about your journey after UAA and what your career path was?
[In my opinion,] with a math degree, there are a couple of options that you can do. You can go teach, or you can go build missiles and work for Raytheon or something like that. Neither one of those really interested me. I thought about getting my PhD, but instead I did my first entrepreneurial or business-oriented thing. I went and looked at tenure-track positions and compared them with the number of math PhDs that we were producing on an annual basis. One-tenth of the math degrees that were being produced were being filled by tenure-track positions. That's terrible. The supply-demand there is really awful.
I paid my way through college working in technology and IT, so I continued on with that. It was one of those things where I went from job to job. I was a developer. That was fun. The math degree worked well when I was a software developer. I was working with databases, and Naive Set Theory underpins a lot of relational algebra, which informs relational databases.
I was always searching, almost like a truffle pig, looking for the right fit. The programming was fun, but it didn't really speak to me. I even took my hand at IT management, and that was good for a time. After a number of years doing that, I started DeepTree. It was one of the best decisions I ever made. Now, in addition to being a CEO, I'm a small business owner. It means I am still on the operational line. I do a lot of work in cybersecurity. That's a really, really beautiful place. It's where I feel like I'm helping people out and providing differentiating value for things that are very difficult for people to access skill-wise. It's also challenging, and there's a fair amount of math involved as well.
Math is dubbed the universal language. Do you find this to be true outside of your immediate career? In what other contexts have you seen people engage meaningfully with mathematics?
Oh, 100%. I would recommend a math degree to anyone. By the way, for what it's worth, I came out of high school with a trash GPA. I had a great time in high school. I really did. I came to UAA on academic probation. So, I had to learn how to study and all that, and I started in, like, Math 105 [which is an introductory algebra course that covers the basics]. I really loved math. I wanted to do it forever and ever. Math is doing fast Fourier transforms or something out of partial differential equations. You learn confidence.
You learn that everything has a fundamental language that describes it. You just have to find it. Working with really difficult math problems or solving something like the fundamental theorem of algebra鈥ou learn to sit with something until you get it. That's part of learning a language. You must have the patience to sit with difficult problems and not give up. You can鈥檛 personalize it and think that your inability to immediately get it is a reflection of your capabilities as a person. I speak English, French, and some Russian, and I also program in multiple languages, but the language of mathematics, in my view, is the ability to have a conversation with somebody about the fundamental attributes of a system and how they interact. It can be an organizational system. It can even be people. There's something called organizational cybernetics, which is an attempt to apply some of these theories to organizations. You can have those conversations and look at things in a way that allows for a higher level of precision because it's somewhat abstract from the details at the moment. So, for me, mathematics is absolutely a fundamental language, and it can aid adjacent languages that may not necessarily be immersed in mathematics but are informed by it.
As a former CAS student and current donor, what would you say is the qualitative or quantitative value of investing in the College of Arts and Sciences?
The quantitative: I've got a business interest.
I want really smart people whom I can hire. There's no direct factor. I don't have a recruitment program, but there is an element of linear dependence at play. It's like if you say to somebody, 鈥淚'm voting,鈥� the probability that they will vote increases. It's an important thing. When smart, informed people join your community, it increases the chances that the people you interview or hire will be just as well-informed.
It's a rising tide that raises all ships. And that is something that鈥檚 both qualitative and quantitative. The more math majors there are, the more flexibility they have to work in different careers. They can become programmers, biologists鈥攔eally anything with the right opportunity. It鈥檚 like having something that supplements their mathematical understanding, and they鈥檙e already predisposed to grasp the fundamental elements of that particular discipline. Because they have access to that language.
So, yeah, I think that if I had my druthers, UAA would be producing at least 20 math majors a year.
We need them.
At UAA we talk a lot about workforce development. CAS is often left out of that conversation because we鈥檙e teaching skills that can be applied in any job, not training for a particular career. Do you have any thoughts about career prospects for CAS majors?
Yeah, it's interesting because we need translators. For example, I've been called a translator. Having the ability to essentialize or translate complex technical concepts into something that people can understand鈥� whether it's through metaphor, analogy, or abstraction 鈥� is a really special skill. We shouldn't sleep on liberal arts majors because they can do that. That skill set is a trait we need in a highly technical world. We need translators more than ever.
Another thing we need is Integrators, or people who integrate ideas. When you think about it, every great age is informed by math. The diesel age was informed by calculus. The digital age is informed by combinatorics and graph theory. The AI age is informed by probability and statistics. When you think about what integration really looks like, every great transition in civilization is driven by people who can integrate mathematical concepts and use them to build instrumentation or products that inform how humans evolve. Humans co-evolve against our tools. We've always co-evolved against our tools. We're tool-making, highly specialized tool-making, storytelling chimps, right?
So integrators are going to come out of the Arts and Sciences. Probabilistically speaking, they can come from anywhere. But if I鈥檓 playing the odds, I'd bet on Arts and Sciences.
Peter, thank you for the fascinating conversation and for your support of the College of Arts and Sciences.