Brown CS Blog

Dear Class of 2025,

We’re leaving Brown together—you’re graduating, I’m retiring. Most of you started in 2021 (wearing masks). I started teaching at Brown in 1976 (maskless but with darker and longer hair), before there was a CS department. Most of you have spent four years here; I’ve spent my entire professional career at Brown.

You’ve completed your undergraduate education. Congratulations! This is a major milestone in your lives. But there’s much more to come. My colleagues and I have taught you a lot about contemporary CS. If you’ve taken advantage of Brown’s open curriculum, you have learned a lot about other disciplines as well. You’re ready for today’s world.

But … CS is changing. And the world is changing. The real value of your education is that you’re equipped to do the work necessary to keep up, to adapt, and to help make (or counter) the changes.

What follows is a brief exposition of my career path. I followed my interests, developed new interests, and, miraculously, things worked out.

I came to Brown thinking I might be a theoretician and (at least) felt well prepared for this role. I discovered, after a few years, that what really interested me were computer systems: how they work, how to make them better—interests that were sort of the antithesis of those of a theoretician. As an undergraduate and then a graduate student (at Cornell and Princeton), I took many good courses from excellent professors. These got me started and prepared me not only to understand subsequent developments in CS, but also to go back and understand what I later became interested in. Most of what I’ve taught in my courses the past decades was not covered in the courses I took as a student, but as my interests changed, I learned new things.

I never took an AI course—not because I had anything against AI, but because no such courses were offered when I was a student. My ignorance of AI has grown exponentially over the years, which I regret. If I had developed an interest in AI (perhaps from watching Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey”, which I saw when it first came out and thought was pretty cool), I would have had to pursue this interest outside the standard classroom. The point is that there may be really important developments in CS (and other fields) that come up in the future. If you’re interested, it’s up to you to pursue them.

Many of you have non-CS, non-academic interests—hobbies—that you really enjoy. If you don’t, I urge you to develop some. Early on, I learned to scuba dive in a course at Brown. (It was a non-credit course that even faculty were allowed to take.) This inspired me to learn photography. The two have greatly enhanced my enjoyment of life. I can no longer dive, so I’ve moved on to bird and (above-water) wildlife photography. My wife and I hope to devote a lot of time to this after I retire.

TLDR: Follow your curiosity. Your studies at Brown have given you the skills for continuing your education—in academia, on the job, and on your own. Use them. Learn new things. But don’t forget to have fun.

Best of luck,

Tom

Thomas W. Doeppner
Royce Family Associate Professor of Teaching Excellence
Associate Professor (Research) of Computer Science