Tennessee Tech University Department of Computer Science Blog

Hi!  This is my first ever blog post. I have written articles for newsletters, conferences, and journals, but had never written a blog post until today.

It is hard to believe that I have been teaching in the Department of Computer Science since August of 1993! I am beginning my twenty-fourth academic year of full-time teaching.  All my colleagues from that first 1993-1994 school year are no longer working in Bruner Hall, due to retirements or professional moves.  When I first started teaching at TTU, I was only about 4 years older than the seniors; now a lot of the freshmen were born in 1998. The new students take for granted a lot of things that are technological advances to me. They have never known life without the World Wide Web or smartphones.

A lot of things have changed in our department since I have been teaching, such as the modernization of our classrooms and the technology inside them. I never thought that I would be working with touch-screen computers and that I would be writing with a stylus directly on the screen and saving my notes in PDF format. I also never thought that I would be recording my lectures every day. I can easily share articles about innovations with my students because of the proliferation of the World Wide Web and do my own life-long learning. I have been able to deal with advising issues from Australia and other countries because of wifi.

Our classes and advising loads have gotten bigger recently, due to the growth in the number of computer science students, but I still strive to learn everyone’s names. It takes longer now, but fortunately I still can learn them.

I always enjoy emails from former students when they write to me and want to recruit more computer science graduates for their companies, and when they just write to me and let me know how they are doing. Occasionally some former students stop by Bruner Hall. It is always great to see them.

This past summer, one of my former students, who spent the 1996-97 school year at TTU as an exchange student from France, contacted me to let me know that he and his family would be spending a few days in Atlanta and Nashville, and he wanted to know if I remembered him and if he and his family could meet with me when they passed through Cookeville. Of course I remembered him, and I was so glad to see him again and meet his family! After his time at TTU, he returned to France and finished his degree there. He then came back to the USA and worked for Microsoft for 8 years and then Amazon for 4 years; he is currently working for Netflix, and has worked there for 4 years. He said that he benefited greatly from his time at TTU; he obtained more practical knowledge here than he did in France.

I hope that more former students will stop by to visit us in Bruner Hall!  Please keep in touch!