Mark Stehlik Announces Retirement, Sort of.

Mark Stehlik, University Teaching Professor, Assistant Dean for Outreach, Director of the CSD Undergraduate Program, co-founder of CS Academy and distinguished figure in the School of Computer Science and in the broad field of computer science, has announced his plans to retire at the end of the 2024-25 academic year. Sort of retire, that is. As a beloved faculty member, advisor, mentor and leader in computer science education, Stehlik’s retirement gives those of us at SCS who have been influenced by him the chance to reflect on a few of the highpoints and the stories of his profound career.

Are you announcing your retirement officially, or what are we calling this?

Stehlik: So, I’m doing this “phased retirement” thing, which I helped get passed as a university policy for teaching faculty. This is my last full-time year because I needed to set a date to stop advising. I didn’t take on any new cohorts after the entry year 2021. And there’s two purposes for me being half-time next year. One is to mentor those remaining students to get them to the finish line, either next December (2025) or by next May (2026). The other is to be here for the person who’s going to replace me.

Your webpage states your preferred title is “Education Engineer.”  Tell me about the significance of that moniker, especially with as many advisees as you’ve had.

Stehlik: The idea in teaching is to figure out where a student is and to try to make them better. But in advising, it takes on a whole new schema, because it’s let us figure out why this parental thing is broken. What can we do about that? How you can be insulated from that and still thrive here? Let’s figure out what courses you can take but not kill you by overloading you.” I’m an experimentalist, which is sort of being an engineer. A student comes to me and tells me they’re going to take six courses this semester. And I’m like, okay, let me see how well you did in the past couple of semesters and what kind of courses you took. If they did all right, I’ll give them a sixth course and then if it turns out it doesn’t work, well, then we’re going to drop them back. So, there’s a sense of tinkering with things. I don’t know all the answers for everyone, but I want to help you find out what your answers can be. And so the way to do that involves some bit of engineering, trying to understand the problem and then constructing an edifice that actually solves that problem for that student.

After choosing Pace University over MIT and others (more on that later), you chose to pursue a Ph.D. in Computer Science at CMU. But before you finished you took a teaching position. How did that come about?

Stehlik: It was the end of my first year, middle of my second year, around that time. I was not excited about the dynamic programming research I was doing. My advisor left to go to Bell Labs, which was the Google of its day. I was advisor-less, mostly rudderless, and not really happy for the first time in my life at school going back to kindergarten. Something was totally wrong and needed to change and I wasn’t sure what it was.

At that time, a faculty member had to leave unexpectedly, and they needed someone to teach Introduction to Programming. After my first year as a Ph.D. student, I taught calculus at my alma mater for people pursuing their MBAs on Wall Street. And it was like teaching calculus to my dad, which was a wonderful way to begin teaching. So I had some validation that a teaching career might be a possibility.

John McDermott was the acting department head at the time. I put up my hand and said, “I think I can do this.” And I think his response was, “Yeah, well, we don’t really have anybody else, so sure.” The story has a happy ending because at the end of the semester after faculty course evaluations, he calls me into his office and says, “Not only do you seem to like this, but you’re also actually good at it.” I had gotten one of the highest faculty course evaluations that a CS faculty member ever had received, mostly because it was something I had always wanted to do.

Tell me about when computer science as a major was transitioning to SCS becoming its own school? How did you get to be the program director of SCS’ undergraduate program?

Stehlik: CSD had been in existence since 1965 — one of the first Ph.D.-granting programs in the world. Then Raj Reddy created the Robotics Institute in 1979, which was the first robotics department in the U.S. So, we had these two departments, and it was time to become a school. Part of the price of “school hood” was you had to own an undergraduate program. Prior to that time (1988) if you did a CS degree here, you did it as an Applied Math major.

We didn’t think we could do this all right away, because Math had been doing it for quite a while.  We also didn’t initially want to manage first-years as they transitioned from high school. We didn’t know how to do any of that stuff and MCS did.  So given our roots were in Applied Math, it made sense that our first undergraduate curriculum was going to be joint with the Mathematics Department. And so the Math-CS degree was born.

The first 200-level courses, 15-211 and 212, were developed by Mary Shaw and a bunch of other people including Randy Pausch. They were originally titled Fundamental Structures of Computer Science I and II, but by 2000 were known as Fundamental Data Structures and Algorithms (211), taught in an imperative language, and Principles of Programming (212), taught in a functional language (originally LISP, then Scheme, and then SML).

Nico Haberman, who was the first dean of SCS, sent out a call for a director for the program. They interviewed a bunch of people, and they didn’t like anybody. So, Nico calls me into his office and says, “Some of us think you might be good for the position, but you didn’t apply. How come?” And I said, “Well, because teaching full-time is what I do.” And he said, “So, what could we do to make you think about this?” And I thought about it for a while. I was a teacher. That’s what I wanted to be. That’s what I am. Finally, I said, “If you let me continue to teach, I’ll consider doing this other administrative thing that I think I’m not going to like, but we’ll see what happens.” So again, in a moment that is etched permanently in my brain, Nico looks at me and says, “So you’re telling me that if we just let you work harder, you’ll be okay with this?” And I’m like, no. Maybe the way I thought about this was if you let me be what I think I am, I’m willing to do this other thing. But anyway, we parted company, and I became the first CS, (well, Math-CS) undergraduate program director.

The last major milestone we should talk about here is the formation of CS Academy with David Kosbie.

Stehlik: David was an ex-Ph.D. student like me. He ended up working at Apple and Microsoft, and then moved back to Pittsburgh and was teaching at a local high school. He and I met for lunch at what was then Lulu’s Noodles, right on Craig Street. He was clearly interested in teaching. I knew him back when we had played intramural football together as Ph.D. students. He was the quarterback. I was an offensive lineman.

Anyway, he wanted to get good computer science material out to the world. So, I persuaded him to apply for a teaching faculty position and we hired him. We co-taught a number of different Intro CS courses and for the last 15 years we had been trying to get CMU’s Intro course out into the world. But at some point, we realized that the world wasn’t ready for 15-112. And we realized this when David, in the Fall of 2017, went to a local convening of AP and other CS teachers at Hampton High School in the North Hills. About 40 teachers were talking about all sorts of computer science curriculum stuff that was available, Scratch and other random things. One of the teachers put up his hand and said, “We’re not trained computer scientists, you are. We don’t know what’s good.  You’re at Carnegie Mellon That’s a pretty good place. Why don’t you make something? It’ll be good and then we can use it.” So, literally, David walks into my office the next day and we sketch that idea out.

(Editor’s note: At this point Stehlik points to a scrawl of red (pictured below) on the whiteboard of his office outlining the genesis of CS Academy.)