Brown CS News

“In his day,” author Charles G. Finney wrote of Kublai Khan, “he was China.” 

If we’re talking about the Brown CS undergraduate program, perhaps the same thing could be said of Tom Doeppner, Royce Family Associate Professor of Teaching Excellence in Computer Science. (We’re making the bold claim because Tom, known to be self-effacing, is unlikely to say it of himself.) Tom was the fifth hire in the Department’s history and has served in multiple leadership roles, including Vice-Chair, Director of Undergraduate Studies, and Director of the Master’s program. He’ll retire at the end of the semester after almost five decades in the classroom.

Tom came to Brown in 1976, when computer science was only an interest group within the Divisions of Applied Mathematics and Engineering. His memories of those early days are vivid.

“One of the things we did in the beginning,” Tom says, “when we were trying to launch the Department, was to get computer equipment. In the late 70s, [former Brown CS faculty member] Bob Sedgewick [now William O. Baker *39 Professor in Computer Science, Emeritus at Princeton University] and I, with a lot of input from others, wrote a grant that bought us our first computer, the VAX-11/780. Everyone accessed it with terminals on their desk, and I ran it. There was no TStaff or the like: I was the initial TStaff, then students who eventually became full-time employees were added to the staff. Other grants funded workstations that went into the Foxboro Auditorium.”

“We went through a fair amount of discussion with industry in that process,” Tom explains, “which was a lot of fun. In 1984, the Macintosh was one of the candidates for our workstations, and Steve Jobs and his team came out to give a presentation. He was a pretty fascinating person. The Mac hadn’t even been announced yet, and he showed up with one in the backpack of someone in his group, which was absolutely unheard of! We were among the first to see it. And it was pretty cool, but not powerful enough. Four years later, we finished the CIT, and we tried to recreate the Foxboro Auditorium here – now the Sunlab. We never purposefully called it that, but after a lot of discussion, we bought Sun workstations, and thus the name.” 

[Editor’s Note: Tom’s full history of Brown CS hardware, much of which can be seen in the Brown CS Museum on the second through fifth floors of the CIT, is available here.]

The major difference between his early days and now, Tom says, is that Brown felt a lot smaller. Sometimes, the smallness was more literal than figurative: initially housed at 182 George Street, the elaborately appointed Pearce Estate that was home to the Division of Applied Mathematics, Tom’s first office was a former pantry whose largest dimension was its height.

“Obviously the course list was smaller,” he adds. “And classrooms were different: for years, there was no other option than chalk on a blackboard, and I hated getting chalk dust all over myself. Before the current era of projecting from your computer screen was a long period of using overhead projectors, writing by hand on foils.”

“Significantly,” says Tom, “Brown wasn’t big on hierarchy. You didn’t have to go through levels and levels of administration, which made it easier to get things done.”

Over the years, Tom’s teaching has included CSCI 0330 Introduction to Computer Systems and its advanced version, CSCI 1330; CSCI 1670 Operating Systems; CSCI 1690 Operating Systems Laboratory and its graduate-level version, CSCI 2670. Over the last decade, Tom has taught more students than any other Brown CS faculty member.

One of his favorite memories dates back to the early 2000s, when Tom was co-teaching a course with former Brown CS faculty member Pascal Van Hentenryck (now an A. Russell Chandler III Chair and Professor at Georgia Tech): “He was an amazing lecturer, he always had people in stitches, and compared to him, I was always a bit boring. So I decided I’d do something about that. I found an old laptop that wasn’t really usable and arranged with my UTAs [Undergraduate Teaching Assistants] to put together a skit where it appeared to students that my computer had accidentally done something really terrible. At that point, one of my UTAs handed me a katana, and I did my best to chop the laptop in two. It got a good response, and I’ve repeated it in every semester of CSCI 0330 since.” [Editor’s Note: a recent video of the skit is available here.]

Many of us who have sent Tom an email and received a reply almost instantly will likely guess that “be responsive” is his answer when asked for teaching secrets: “Students have questions, so I’ve always tried to answer them as quickly as possible. But carefully. Sometimes in lectures, I have a tendency to go too quickly, so I appreciate students asking me to slow down. I’m very much a fan of giving students projects. I never really liked exams: writing them, grading, proctoring. I used to give midterms and finals, but for a long time I couldn’t figure out how to do them remotely. Then the pandemic hit, and I haven’t used them since. It causes a lot less stress for all parties involved.” 

“Not that my projects don’t cause stress!” he jokes. 

Over the years, who were Tom’s inspirations? His answer is immediate.

“I certainly have to name [Thomas J. Watson, Jr. University Professor of Technology and Education and Professor of Computer Science] Andy van Dam. Nobody works as hard or works people as hard. He’s also a good friend. I’ve worked with four different Deans of the College over the years, particularly on the College Curriculum Council, and I’m really impressed with them: they put a lot of time into the undergraduate program and really want to improve it for all involved. I’m also inspired by any number of my colleagues who devote so much effort to research and students at the same time and do so well with both.”

His advice for those colleagues is simple: give students opportunities to work together.

“Before COVID-19,” explains Tom, “most students hung out in the Sunlab. There was a lot of socialization, which was great for the Department, but during the pandemic, they had to work on their own machines. When they came back, the Sunlab was less necessary. To get students working again, I loosened up my collaboration policies, and I think that helped. I’ve also noticed that among a large staff of UTAs, everyone gets to know each other, which is really important. That’s one of the big pluses of the program.”

Few people have Tom’s insider perspective of the UTA program, which many have called a hallmark of the Brown CS undergraduate experience, so we ask him for insights that others may have missed.

“When I first came to Brown,” Tom says, “I hadn’t seen anything like it, and it didn’t make sense to me, but Andy told me that to understand it, I had to experience it for myself (i.e. to essentially be my own TA). So, at first I had no TAs, then a grad student TA, then undergrads: people who had taken my course and knew what they liked and they didn’t, and could help. I was immediately convinced that it was a great way of doing things. In our early days, UTAs received a stipend. Over the years, the program became more structured: the socially responsible computing UTAs were added, and UTAs got compensated as hourly workers. Our UTAs do amazing work: they help build a course, they set its culture. They can add enthusiasm and extra insights to the material that wouldn’t happen with just a professor and a few grad students. They make our courses work.” 

As our interview begins to wind down, Tom glances at the massive photos of undersea life that adorn his office. (He’s been a scuba diver for several decades and took them himself.)

“What’s next for me,” Tom says, “has increasingly little to do with two of the things I’m best known for, CS and scuba diving. But I remarried in August, and my wife and I have a common interest in bird watching, so I’ve switched to taking photos of birds rather than fish. I want to do more of that, in locations exotic and not.” 

Few faculty members have taught as many undergraduates as Tom, so we ask what advice he has for the next generation of students.

“First of all,” he says, “the only way to really learn about something is to get your hands dirty and work out the details yourself. For systems, you have to write a lot of code. But you’re figuring out what’s fun! That matters, because what you’re doing in college might become your life’s work. As an undergrad, I was interested in computer science and physics, and deciding between the two wasn’t easy, but I figured that physics had been around for a long time, and with CS, I was having a lot more fun with the assignments. I intrinsically enjoyed them. I really hope our students feel the same and take advantage of all the courses and activities available at Brown.”

Tom follows the comment with a truly personal connection, explaining that the photos all around us are the result of a no-credit course on scuba diving that he took at Brown in the mid-80s: “I signed up completely on a lark! I had a great time, and that course kept giving back. I put what I learned to use and it really defined what I did for a long period of time.” 

It’s surprisingly apt: the man who served Brown CS undergraduates for decades found one of his life’s great passions through his association with the University. It’s no less a symbiosis than a shrimp cleaning a fish’s teeth, a clownfish (remember the katana?) safe among sea anemones.

Tom’s happiest moments, he says, have been when he was teaching: “I’m grateful to my students, past and present, for giving me the chance to do something I really enjoy, which is getting up in front of people to explain something in the best way I can. For me, that’s fun, and when that comes off well, it’s exhilarating. Sometimes it comes off less well, but I’m always very interested in the material that I teach. I hope that comes across.” 

For tens of thousands of students, over almost a half-century, we know it has.

For more information, click the link that follows to contact Brown CS Communications Manager Jesse C. Polhemus.