Hi, I’m Minjia

I’ve spent more than six years working in tech, at eBay, Accenture and Coursera, and now at Braze. I’m also a co-founder of Brave Career. I studied Industrial Engineering at the University of Toronto with a minor in Artificial Intelligence, then did a master’s in Computer Science at UIUC.

Why I teach this

I studied AI before generative AI existed, back when it mostly meant statistics, models and a lot of math. When tools like ChatGPT and Claude arrived, I was one of the first people around me trying everything. They changed how I work: ideas I’d been sitting on for years, I could suddenly build in a weekend.

Five years at Coursera taught me how much access to education matters. Everyone deserves to learn this, not just engineers. So I started teaching people with no tech background to build with AI, and watching them make something real is still my favourite part.

A lot of people feel pressure to “learn AI” and end up in courses that hand them a template. They follow the steps, and a month later they can’t use any of it. I want people to leave understanding how to think about what they’re building, so they can keep going without me.