TITLE: Motivated by Teaching Undergrads
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: May 05, 2014  4:35 PM
DESC: 
-----
BODY:
Recently, a gentleman named Seth Roberts passed away.  I didn't
know Roberts and was not familiar with his work.  However,
several people I respect commented on his life and career, so I
took a look at
<A HREF="http://andrewgelman.com/2014/04/30/seth-roberts/">
   one colleague's reminiscence</A>.
Roberts was an interesting fellow who didn't do things the usual
way for a research academic.  This passage stood out:

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
 Seth's academic career was unusual.  He shot through college and
 graduate school to a tenure-track job at a top university, then
 continued to do publication-quality research for several years
 until receiving tenure.  At that point he was not a superstar
 but I think he was still considered a respected member of the
 mainstream academic community.  But during the years that
 followed, Seth lost interest in that thread of research (you can
 see this by looking at the dates of most of his highly-cited
 papers).  He told me once that his shift was motivated by
 teaching introductory undergraduate psychology: the students, he
 said, were interested in things that would affect their lives,
 and, compared to that, the kind of research that leads to a
 productive academic career did not seem so appealing.
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

That last sentence explains, I think, why so many computer science
faculty at schools that are not research-intensive end up falling
away from traditional research and publishing.  When you come into
contact with a lot of undergrads, you may well find yourself
caring more deeply about things that will affect their lives in a
more direct way.  Pushing deeper down a narrow theoretical path,
or developing a novel framework for file system management that
most people will never use, may not seem like the best way to use
your time.

My interests have certainly shifted over the years.  I found
myself interested in software development, in particular tools and
practices that students can use to make software more reliably and
teaching practices that would students learn more effectively.
Fortunately, I've always loved programming qua programming, and
this has allowed me to teach different programming styles with an
eye on how learning them will help my students become better
programmers.  Heck, I was even able to stick with it long enough
that functional programming became popular in industry!  I've also
been lucky that my interest in languages and compilers has been
of interest to students and employers over the last few years.

In any event, I can certainly understand how Roberts diverged
from the ordained path and turned his interest to other things.
One challenge for leaving the ordained path is to retain the
mindset of a scientist, seeking out opportunities to evaluate
ideas and to disseminate the ones that appear to hold up.  You
don't need to publish in the best journals to disseminate good
ideas widely.  That may not even be the best route.

Another challenge is to find a community of like-minded people in
which to work.  An open, inquisitive community is a place to find
new ideas, a place to try ideas out before investing too much in
a doomed one, and a place to find the colleagues most of us need
to stay sane while exploring what interests.  The software and CS
worlds have helped create the technology that makes it possible
to grow such communities in new ways, and our own technology now
supports some amazing communities of software and CS people.  It
is a good time to be an academic or developer.

I've enjoyed reading about Roberts' career and learning about what
seems to have been one of the academia's unique individuals.  And
I certainly understand how teaching introductory undergrads might
motivate a different worldview for an academic.  It's good to be
reminded that it's okay to care about the things that will affect
the lives of our students now rather than later.
-----