Duncan Hull

Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Computer Science at The University of Manchester

Duncan Hull is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Computer Science at The University of Manchester. He has spent the last decade working as an industrial experience & employability tutor for computer science undergraduate students, encouraging them to complete internships before they graduate, either during summer or as a sandwich year. However, he has his roots in biology and has had what he terms a very ‘squiggly’ career progression.

Undergraduate in Plant Sciences

Having grown up in a rural area of the UK and with an interest in nature, Duncan decided to study plant sciences at the undergraduate level. Here he studied plants’ life all the way from the genetic & molecular level right through to whole ecosystems. It’s ‘full-stack’ biology, as he described it.

He didn’t have a strong sense of where he wanted to take his career, primarily following his nose and exploring various options. At the time, there was a new technology called ‘the web’ just coming into the mainstream, and Duncan soon picked up some web skills. He began working on scientific web publishing for Blackwell Science. He realised there’s quite a broad range of jobs in computing and decided to explore this avenue.

Shifting to Computer Science

After some time working for a consultancy in computing, he intended to return to college to upskill and then come back into the industry. The computer science conversion master’s at The University of Manchester was exactly what he was looking for, bringing in people who’ve worked in the sciences and compressing the undergraduate computer science degree down into six months. 

He continued on this track, completing a Ph.D. that blended his knowledge from both biology and computer science. He was building tools to aid biologists in analysing genomic data such as gene sequences, using his programming skills in a biology context. He recalled how people at the time couldn’t fully pin him down.

“The biologists didn’t really see me as a biologist, nor the computer scientists a computer scientist.”

Duncan subsequently completed a postgraduate certificate in education. For a time he taught science in multiple secondary schools, and soon after applied for a post-doctorate position at his university. This has led to his current position both teaching and working with students of computer science at The University of Manchester.

Non-Linear Career Paths

Duncan reflects that in his experience many careers don’t tend to follow a linear track. Very little has been planned or deliberate for him, he has instead followed his nose at each step. He notes that it didn’t always guarantee the greatest choice each step of the way, but in the long term has worked out for him. His career path has been, in some ways, “a bit all over the place”.

“There’s a wonderful book called The Squiggly Career. It describes a classic career path as a linear one, for instance: get your bachelor’s, your master’s, maybe a Ph.D., and become successful. It hasn’t worked like that for me, and I don’t think it works like that for a lot of people.”

Diversity in Computer Science

From his experience in education, children are very affected by the stereotypes that we permeate. Anyone can study computer science, and tackling any misconceptions about that has to start from an early age.

“The toughest classes were the ‘low ability’ science classes, where many of the girls were there because they thought science was just for boys.”

He’s glad to see that this is slowly improving. He finds there’s a large positive improvement in the atmosphere and contribution of group projects when there’s a greater balance of people. 

For encouragement, he believes that perhaps emphasising more socially responsible aspects of computer science might result in different groups of people studying it. These could be environmental projects, social entrepreneurship, and other areas where the focus isn’t placed on making a lot of money as it can sometimes be. He hopes that over time, an emphasis on non-traditional pathways in computer science and the huge range of ways to use these skills will result in a natural improvement.