Computing Crossroads is an initiative dedicated to uncovering the incredible, yet easily underappreciated, value of a computing perspective across a diverse array of fields. Conversely, the project also seeks to reveal the great value brought into computing by those coming from disciplines traditionally considered distant or even unrelated.

Each edition features two vignettes, crafted from conversations with professionals either working in computing who came from other backgrounds and disciplines, and/or those who have transitioned from a traditional academic computing background to other pursuits.

In placing these non-traditional pathways within computing in the spotlight—picturing computing as a crossroads—our goal is to expose the diversity of thought, perspective and background found in those who have engaged with computing, regardless of their entry route or subsequent career choices. In the coming years, it is likely that there will an increasing number of people from a wide variety of industries who have gained familiarity with programming concepts or have completed some form of computing coursework, bringing with them unique experience in forging their own individual career path. Similarly, it is likely that more people in computing fields will come from other areas and disciplines, contributing valuable perspectives and unique insights.

Many of the Computing Crossroads volunteers, we have found, stand in direct contradiction to the stereotypes and misconceptions that can at times be a major challenge and barrier to entry for prospective computing students. We have also found that when focusing on career diversity, many other kinds of diversity come into focus. These stories, we hope, will create a shift in outlook for many in terms of what it means to 'do computing' and what the value in having a computing background can bring. We also hope to inspire a new generation of students to come and explore their interest in computing, leaving behind any misconceptions that they must be a "mathematics genius," come from a particular background, or fit a certain stereotype. We also hope that this small project can help increase the sense of belonging of anyone who has spent any time studying or working in computing, even if temporarily, regardless of where they come from or where they end up going.

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Many of the Computing Crossroads volunteers, we have found, stand in direct contradiction to the stereotypes and misconceptions that can at times be a major challenge and barrier to entry for prospective computing students.

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The Computing Crossroads project is led by Brett Becker with the help of research assistants Megan Maley and Daniel Gallagher.

Brett found computing through mechanical engineering then physics after a stint as a commercial fisherman and lumber truck driver amongst other shorter-lived pursuits. Computing also played a part in him moving from the USA to Ireland where he has now lived for 20+ years. He has focused much time and effort into allowing younger generations to spark their own interest in programming, recently publishing the leading second-level textbook for computer science in Ireland. His research areas generally revolve around computing education.

Megan recently graduated from Scripps College in Claremont, California where she majored in computer science with a minor in writing and rhetoric. As an international student studying through University College Dublin's summer program, she was excited to work on the project and learn about new perspectives in computing—so much so that after her time in Ireland she chose to continue working on Computing Crossroads.

Daniel is a University College Dublin Computer Science graduate who was instrumental in getting Computing Crossroads to where it is today. He is now charting his own crossroads journey by beginning an MA in Linguistics at University Leipzig beginning the academic year 2023/2024.

Computing Crossroads was started with a November 2019 SIGCSE Special Projects Grant.

Introduction to Vignettes

In this issue of Crossroads, we decided to highlight two remarkable individuals: Marian Petre, The Brain Picker, and Charles Wallace, The Language Lover. Both boast strong foundations in linguistics and later became influential figures in computing education, however their stories stand alone. Marian, a computer scientist and professor at the Open University, has interrogated the intersection between psycho-linguistics and computation, investigating how people approach and solve problems. Charles' unique path has provided him with critical thinking skills and the ability to interact with others in seemingly disparate disciplines.

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Marian Petre: The Brain-Picker
Emeritus Professor at The Open University

A brain-picker at heart, Marian explored and documented the thinking of expert software developers and problem solvers throughout her career. In the early age of software development, she notes, a diverse background was part of the 'typical' computer science pathway.

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Introduction

Marian Petre is an Emeritus Professor at The Open University and a Distinguished Professor at the University of California Irvine. She was born in Illinois in a place she described as a "one-horse town whose horse died."

Marian's first real encounter with programming was in high school, when a class was offered that gave her the opportunity to program the only computer available, a PDP-8. She was soon thrown out due to "improper use", that is, she was using it to generate poetry instead of solving mathematical problems. But she was reinstated, and she subsequently helped develop software used to schedule classes.

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Why is CS always the bridesmaid and not the bride? Fundamentally, Marian notes, it combines so many other disciplines and in turn draws much inspiration from them. It is founded in mathematics and logic, but is ultimately bounded only by what people can imagine and build.

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Much of her young adult life was spent coming to terms with computers entering society whether she liked it or not, and she realised that either she would have to master them, or they would master her. She worked for a time in a company that created labels for consumer goods, and, in the course of running the inventory software, kept finding bugs and reporting them, which led to her first conversations with developers.

Psycholinguistics

She attended Swarthmore college, which emphasised breadth in the first years, and where she had the opportunity to explore her multifarious interests.

She took a course on psycholinguistics; it was a discipline that hadn't been fully ironed out at the time. The standards of evidence were only emerging, and professors were encouraging students to think hard and to ask questions. She found the relationship between language and thought incredibly exciting and so decided to make psycholinguistics the focus of her undergraduate degree.

This allowed her to do research as an undergraduate with wonderful teachers and mentors. She was pushed to understand the world in rigorous terms, yet be driven by her own interests. When she dared to challenge something, they expected her to step up to the task and deliver an evidence-based argument. She appreciates how important this style of education was to her development, and believes this open-mindedness to students' curiosity, no matter their background, is incredibly important.

Moving Towards Computer Science

After graduating from Swarthmore and working for a couple of engineering firms, she realised it would be useful to escape one's national perspective and moved to the UK. She signed up for Oxford Polytechnic's undergraduate computer science (CS) degree, which she described as 'beautifully traditional' and covering everything from the electrons to the code. She finally understood things from the ground up, which was incredibly powerful for her and sparked an interest in pursuing CS, which provided a context in which to pursue her interest in the relationship between language and thought.

She applied for PhD studentships in CS, ending up at University College London, where people were intrigued that someone with both psycholinguistics and CS degrees wanted to complete a PhD revolving around CS. She wanted to take a scientific approach by asking questions and running experiments, which was completely foreign to the engineering-oriented department at the time. It was unusual, but her determination to follow her interests was clear, and she was accepted.

Her focus was on picking the brains of the smartest people in various domains to see how they approached and solved problems; she describes herself as having been a glorified journalist researching expertise. She found that people do not think in programming languages, but in personal pseudo-languages, and she highlighted the significance of accurate operational models. She found this work to be invigorating, naturally blending her skills in both psycholinguistics and computer science.

The Crossroads of Psycholinguistics & Computer Science

Why is CS always the bridesmaid and not the bride? Fundamentally, Marian notes, it combines so many other disciplines and in turn draws much inspiration from them. It is founded in mathematics and logic, but is ultimately bounded only by what people can imagine and build. It sits as the nexus discipline, where subjects criss-cross over each other. It is an extension of people, and is situated in their social, conceptual, physical, and technological world.

It is clear to her that her psycholinguistics degree laid the foundation for much of her later work, existing as an indispensable partner to her subsequent education in computer science. Many of those whom she has interviewed began somewhere else too. When the field of software development was young, and CS was not yet an established academic discipline, it was inevitable that developers had their roots elsewhere. Many began in mathematics, or physics, or classics, or music, and the intersections of these dual interests were incredibly interesting to her. "There are many paths up the mountain," she notes.

Nevertheless, there are common patterns which do characterize this diverse array of minds. They are far more interested in engaging in ideas than in being right, and have very little sense of status. This mindset of openness, curiosity, and humility is something she believes isn't emphasised enough in the discipline; many have a sense that they must "prove their chops".

Remaining Curious

There are flavors of computer science which have a stilted and mechanistic view of how things must progress. Sometimes companies can see their programmers as plug-and-play. Stick them in a seat, send them some tasks, and handle their output. They are in some senses akin to software factories, which are very different from the teams that really innovate. The people that Marian has found to be the most interesting have always been adamantly curious. Few of them stayed solely on a single road, and yet it has only enhanced their perspective, ability, and career.

Marian's book, Software Design Decoded: 66 Ways Experts Think, discusses the practices and principles that expert software designers use to create great software and can be found on Amazon.co.uk.

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Charles Wallace: The Language Lover
Associate Professor at Michigan Technological University

Charles Wallace combines his experience as a computer scientist, linguist, and software developer to drive his research in exploring how humans can better understand, build, and use software. He has also founded two student-run outreach programs which focus on computer science education in the local Michigan area: BASIC (Building Adult Skills in Computing) (https://bdb.mtu.edu/basic/) and Copper Country Coders (https://coders.mtu.edu/).

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Introduction

Charles grew up in a small town in northern California. His elementary school teachers, especially the school librarian, exposed him to a wide diversity of subjects and put an emphasis on exploration and creativity. In this environment, science, art, technology, and literature were all valued and interconnected. In 1979, the librarian undertook the radical move of buying an Apple II computer for the school, and he turned to Charles to figure out what to do with it. Charles and his friends worked with teachers to develop educational games for students at the school. To him, computing was a new way to be creative, particularly as a tool to encourage learning and communication. But in the exciting mix of subjects at school, he remained keen to explore his varied interests and didn't settle on computer science just yet.

Language and Computing

At the University of Pennsylvania, he took a wide range of courses, but with a focus on language and literature. Natural language and its structure had always fascinated him, as was evidenced by being one of the few in his high school English class who actually enjoyed diagramming sentences, that is, graphing the relations between the words of sentences to reveal their underlying structure. This drew him to a major in linguistics. While the connections between linguistics and computer science may seem unclear to some, Charles feels the crossover is quite natural. In particular, the structuralist linguistics of Noam Chomsky and others were a tremendous influence on the development of programming languages. He also got some exposure to interdisciplinary work between the two fields, working on a natural language processing project as a research assistant.

Charles was quite resistant to the notion of career—to him, it seemed limiting, and particularly in the atmosphere of the 1980s, too oriented around making money. He felt more comfortable improvising as he went, but with an eye toward education, inspired by his early years. He'd kept his hand in computing during college, working as a software developer in California during the summer, and then full-time after graduating. He completed a Masters in linguistics at the University of California, Santa Cruz before pivoting back to computing, upon realizing that it would better allow him to combine his interdisciplinary interests. He went on to earn a PhD in computer science at the University of Michigan, with a large part of his dissertation on programming language semantics.

Life in Academia

Charles now occupies a faculty position in the Department of Computer Science at Michigan Tech and is also Associate Dean for matters of teaching and curriculum. His education in linguistics feels to him somewhat like a distant star or planet, yet it did have a strong element of identity-setting for him. Although he struggled for a time with not fitting into the field of computing, he now embraces his position as a semi-outsider, as it gives him a broader, more critical perspective than he otherwise would have. He's also very comfortable working with people outside of the traditional computer science domain, in psychology, gerontology, environmental science, writing studies, and ethics.

This background in language has also given him a strong attention to well-crafted communication and its importance in software development. When working on a project, how do you identify that moment where you need to have a meaningful discussion with other team members, and how do you design the discussion? How can you include everyone? Can you communicate your ideas effectively? These are questions that students need to grapple with, not just in separate writing courses but also in their technical curriculum. One fruitful means of exercising communication skills is participation in outreach activities, where students employ their computing expertise in ways that help community members.

Exploring Options

There's a lot of hype around getting a degree in computer science, and the job security and high salaries that come with it. Charles is sanguine about the prospects of computer science graduates, but he also urges caution. He sees many students who enter computer science for the wrong reasons, motivated by anxiety about the future rather than true interest in the field. He laments the high cost of higher education nowadays, which drives students to rush through their education and makes it more difficult to explore in the way he did.

Authors

Brett A. Becker
University College Dublin, Ireland
[email protected]

Megan Maley
Scripps College, USA
[email protected]

Daniel Gallagher
University Leipzig
[email protected]

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