SOSP Professional Travel Scholarship: Reflections by Recipient Cary Gray

I first attended SOSP in 1989, shortly before finishing my graduate study. I’ve been at all but one SOSP since then; I think of SOSP as my professional home. For most of that time, however, I’ve been an outlier, straddling the gap between the systems research community at SOSP and a very different community involved in undergraduate education. Whichever group I’m with, I feel I have to do a lot of explaining about the other. But I do feel that maintaining my connection to SOSP has been one of the most important things that I have done for the sake of my twenty years of undergraduate teaching. The schools in which I have worked are focused on undergraduates – in our science programs, that is all that we have—and on teaching. I’ve also been in programs with few faculty, so that my teaching assignments run across the entire field, not just systems courses. The big reward is in the opportunity to invest in my students, because there is lots of close contact over the four years that they are here. The downside is that it is hard to remain active in a research community. One of the most important things I can provide my students is perspective. It is vital that I maintain the outlook of a computer scientist who teaches, rather than being (only) a teacher of computer science. SOSP is my lifeline, a biennial pilgrimage for a chance to again immerse myself in a few days of conversation with folks who are working at the frontiers of research. That’s very refreshing, and it is a tremendous help as I think about what needs to be in our too-crowded curriculum and how to approach teaching it. And I’ve had lots of great conversations about undergraduate computer science: at my first SOSP after I started teaching, there was a memorable late night with Bruce Nelson and Mark Weiser, who were at the time preparing to advise the schools that they had attended. The CS-education conferences are useful, but they aren’t the like SOSP. The spectrum of principally-undergraduate colleges is broad, and I’ve chosen to work in a region of that spectrum where the teaching loads are fairly heavy and the support structures for research are light. I’ve usually attended SOSP at my own expense–that’s how valuable I find it. So I’m grateful for the financial support of a scholarship for 2013, and I think it would be a valuable service to the both communities— systems and undergraduate education—if faculty from more of the principally-undergraduate CS programs could share in the SOSP experience.