Seth Fogarty: CS Disrupter

Condensed from the original story on the cs.rice.edu website.

Rice University computer science alumnus Seth Fogarty (Ph.D. ’12) didn’t plan to be a disrupter. In fact, the only life he seemed to be disrupting was his own. He had never heard of Rice University, but it was in the top 50 schools for graduate programs in computer science, so he applied as a formality.

“My BS CS is from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign,” he said, “and I thought there was no way I’d go to Houston. I’m from Chicago – I love snow and hate heat. My first choice grad schools were all well-known universities in the northern states.”

Although he received multiple admission offers, Rice was one of two schools that offered him funding. He visited the other one first.

Fogarty said. "They welcomed me by saying, ‘We’ll take you to a basketball game.’ I don’t even like basketball.

“Then I got to Rice and they handed me a map and said, ‘We’re in the museum district, here are the 16 museums in walking distance.’ Next, they gave me a walking tour – the campus was beautiful and the people were engaging. At that point, I messaged my friends that I might be moving to Texas.”

He arrived expecting to focus on programming languages, and subsequently shifted his focus to formal verification/theory of computation. He also expected to work in industry after completing his Ph.D.

“Then I was TA’ing for Dan Wallach and he asked if I’d like to teach a class. It was just a single lecture, but it was cool and led to a more gradual shift in my goals," said Fogarty.

An experience in his second year at Rice ultimately completed his shift to academia. Fogarty was working on a paper with his adviser, Moshe Vardi, when Vardi told him to take a rhetoric class.

Fogarty said, “My writing course at UIUC was software engineering, not a rhetoric course. That’s how I ended up at Rice as the only grad student in ENGL 306. But that writing class was probably the most valuable class for my career, both in grad school and beyond.”

He said communicating ideas is as important as developing them and knowing how to write is one of the core skills needed in academia. “Even in industry,” he said, “a core part of your job description is communication. You really need to be able to talk to other people about your ideas and write about them."

His passion for clear communications is one of the reasons Fogarty remained in Texas after graduate school and went to work in a liberal arts university, disrupting the traditional track of a Rice CS graduate student focused on a career in academia.

Fogarty said, “I came to Trinity University because I think being able to communicate your ideas is more than half of your job. We’re a liberal arts school and our CS program is much smaller than UIUC’s, but Trinity has a focus on written, audio, and visual communication skills and I think those are important skills.”

Before wrapping up his Ph.D. and moving to San Antonio, Fogarty completed two sabbaticals, in what he jokes are "the only two places hotter than Houston in the summer" and both situations led to papers. His first collaboration with Y.K. Tsay at the National Taiwan University was part of an NSF program and the speed of their research results surprised both of them.

“It was an amazingly productive summer and even Moshe asked me how we were able to get a paper out of those three months. But the sabbatical wasn’t just about the research we conducted, it was about experiencing a different advising style, a different lab set up, how other people work. When you come from an amazing place, it is good to see that other people can have equally amazing approaches.”

On Fogarty’s second sabbatical, he joined his adviser in a collaboration with one of Vardi’s colleagues at Hebrew University. In one of the team’s discussions, Fogarty proposed a topic that the senior researchers agreed to pursue; it was the first time a he collaborated on a paper that resulted from research he’d suggested as a graduate student.

His sabbatical in Israel was also the first time Fogarty realized he not only gained a new cultural understanding, but could also influence it. He said, “I’d brought a competitive board game called Dominion and introduced it to the CS students at Hebrew University. They played it so much, it became disruptive.”

Fogarty recommends other graduate students get out of their existing research environment and into another one, to see things differently. He said, “See how they introduce ideas, conduct meetings, and how you sometimes introduce a board game that ruins productivity.”