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My short bio: I am a Computer Science Graduate student studying networking and distributed systems at the University of Washington. This fall, I took a quarter off to teach at the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology. I taught two classes: Operating Systems to the CS seniors, and Databases to the CS juniors.

It was a really interesting experience to live in the DPRK, and one that very few americans have. We interacted somewhat regularly with the diplomatic community in Pyongyang, because they are essentially the only other other long-term english speaking residents there.

The university I taught at is unique in the country in a lot of ways: Instruction is in english, and mainly from foreign professors. There were 50-60 professors there this fall, with maybe 20 of them Caucasians (like me). The majority of professors were Korean-American.

The university's website is down at the moment (normally ), but some information is available here:

We got a lot of time to interact with the students, which was awesome, and also did a fair amount of tourism. I'm happy to talk more about the (admittedly fairly privileged slice) of life that I saw in pyongyang!

My Proof: Instagram: Twitter: Links will be posted from both shortly linking to this ama.

Edit: woah, so many questions! I'm trying to get through them but it's going to take a while. There are a lot of posts accusing me of being a traitor / aiding the enemy. For me, teaching undergrad CS feels like a humanitarian aid similar to providing food maybe, where it's something they desperately need for a functioning economy in the modern world. That combined with the chance to add some humanity of what americans are to the students who will one day be reasonably powerful seemed like a net positive to be. Both for the US, and for the eventual state of North Korea.

Edit 2: Thanks for the response! I'm going to go to bed pretty soon. Apologies if I don't get to your question