Joshua Gross

Assistant Professor of Computer Science

California State University Monterey Bay

He’s not a mathematician, and is under no illusion that he is one. Joshua believes firmly that the illusion is that you have to be one kind of person or have one type of intellect to work in computer science. 

Joshua Gross is an assistant professor of computer science at California State University Monterey Bay. He has been at the faculty level for about twelve years, having earned his PhD in 2009. Though leaving school with a love of literature and history, he had little sense of where he wanted to take himself. During his time as an undergraduate however, an off-hand programming class he took would end up having a reigning influence over the development of his career. 

As an undergraduate he decided to study History and English, two subjects he loved in high school. However, he had classified himself as a person that couldn’t do well in STEM as he had struggled with mathematics in college, a struggle he eventually had to face down to succeed in CS.

“Calculus was hard for me, so I believed I couldn’t learn it. The real problem was that I didn’t yet have the study habits or work ethic.” 

Halfway through his undergraduate studies, Josh began building static web pages to earn a little money. Though what he was doing wasn’t really programming, he points out, it still provided the opportunity to work alongside a number of computer science students. He saw the different kinds of things they were working on and developed an interest. Nearing the end of his bachelor’s, he was required to take a class that would earn him enough credits to satisfy his general education requirements. He decided to take a class in programming, thinking it would satisfy his light interest in the area. 

“I had to do a lot of scrambling. If there was something you didn’t know, then you had to go learn it.”

This class gave him a personal starting point for what direction he wanted to go. After graduating, he first ran tech support for inkjet printers and was subsequently hired at a software development firm. This rapidly growing field excited him, though at the time he felt as though he was somewhat “thrown in the deep end”, meanwhile also working to complete a part-time master’s during evenings and weekends. It was tricky, “I had to do a lot of scrambling. If there was something you didn’t know, then you had to go learn it.” It was an interest in research that eventually led him to a PhD; later, he began his first tenure track position at a small liberal arts college in Illinois. 

Moving our conversation back towards his undergraduate studies, I wanted to know whether he felt that he had gained value from studying History and English. Analytical writing, he goes on to say, is beyond stringing sentences together. You have to say something meaningful. 

“One of the most critical ideas of higher education is that we’re building fundamental educational skills.” 

He believes that it isn’t so much about teaching one something that they will immediately turn around and use. Education should be open-ended and build the skills needed to do more and more challenging work over time. His undergraduate degree gave him exactly this. He was able to not just read and understand material, but actually gain valuable insights from that which he was looking at.

This is one of the reasons he encourages students to try out anything in college that they feel they have an interest for. In programming, he believes that many try it once and think it’s too hard for them, but in reality they’ve just run into the necessary walls that everyone faces. 

You shouldn’t be afraid to keep going with it, Joshua emphasises. He finds that this same misconception of needing to be a certain type of person for computer science extends to race or gender. That many computer science faculty in the US are principally white or Asian men can create false ideas around what one must be in order to succeed. He is seeing some improvements, however there’s much work to be done to make everyone feel comfortable as a computer science student. 

He ends with an important point that often gets overlooked in conversations about computer science. He believes that there is a “huge obsession with success of career or outcomes, but most of the students enjoy at least a significant number of the classes.” It doesn’t mean you’re going to like everything, but there is a false idea that these students are all well-disciplined and willing to do this hard work that’s not enjoyable at all due to good outcomes. From Josh’s experience, this simply isn’t true. It can be a challenge at first to become comfortable with these new skills, but he ensures that there should be no prejudice in who can and who can’t enjoy the world of programming.

You can further follow Joshua and his thoughts on his active Quora profile.