Matthew Ober
Dr. Katerina Spasovska
COMM 304-01
3/2/2016
Out of this World Programmer Pursues Education
With all of the different careers choices that everyone is able to pursue, not many end up in NASA at least for a while. WCU Professor in the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science Mark Holliday, began his career programming shuttles for NASA at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas in 1978.
At that time the last Apollo mission ended in 1972, so Holliday was writing a lot of the software for some of the first space shuttles after the Apollo missions. However he left in 1980. A year later, NASA started with the space shuttle missions that lasted for 30 years. Out of a total 135 missions only two ended with disaster - Challenger in 1986 and [ ] Columbia in 2003 (
And as everyone knows, the experience is always important. Is the job stressful? “It was somewhat stressful, but mainly self-induced stress in the sense that the software that I was writing was critical to the space shuttle,” explained Holliday.
Instead of actually working in the space center itself, Mark performed most of his work in an office building just off-site from the space center. He was working in a relatively small team with nine other programmers, two technical managers and one person above the managers. And he was writing a code from scratch creating his own software. Mark would create a software by himself. As he explained they were working for a supervising contractor before going back on-site to mission control, where they tested the software that they had created for the upcoming space shuttles.
"I would go over to the console and I would hear all these flight engineers practicing, using my software,” Holliday said with a smile.
When asked what the hardest part about working for the space center was. Whether it was the stress, the hours, the pay, etcetera. He stated that "It varied. So when you get a job as a software developer, it’s actually harder than an academic classes. So, in academic classes, computer science, usually the projects you do are starting from a blank slate. Write a program that does x. So you then write it from scratch, which actually makes it much, much easier, because typically (in the work regarding the space program) it says “Okay, you have all of this code, you are in charge of maintaining it. This code has been written over the past ten years, by twenty different people, no one knows how it works, you’re supposed to figure it all out. And then later on, time constraints would become more of an issue because we would have to put forward a certain code before they could test it on the space shuttles.”
Mr. Holliday actually only stayed at the Johnson Space Center from 1978 until 1980, a quick two years working as a systems programmer. The glory of NASA is not the dream for everyone. He began to explain that he wanted to get into the field of education.
"I went to graduate school. I wanted to become a professor. You know, I loved the life of being a scholar, the life of a mind. Studying things and learning things and trying to organize it and be able to work with other people so that they learn it and that they get to see how neat it is to learn things. And so that is what I wanted to do in the long term.” explained Holliday.
How different education is to what he did with systems programming. I learned that in the classes, he has to actually come up with the projects and with the codes for the students to actually use in the projects. And with ever-expanding technology, it is becoming increasingly difficult. There are new programming languages and techniques so there is always learning going on, which he described as “enjoyable.” However the transition between the two career choices was hard. He had done well as an undergraduate and had worked hard during his two years at NASA, but it was hard transferring back to the life of a student. He described it as “A little bit more change than I had expected. All of the teaching methods had changed from when I was in college and so I had to adjust.”
After finishing his career in NASA Holliday moved for the next 6 years at the University of Wisconsin where he got his masters and PhD, then worked at Duke as a professor for about eight years. After leaving Duke,Holliday came to Western Carolina University in 1994 and has been here ever since.
“I have been in his classes since I first started at Western. And it is always really cool to hear some of the stories that he tells about working at the Johnson Space Center.” This was one of the quotes received from Grant Brown, one of the students in Dr. Holliday’s classes. Dr. Holliday is a very casual, but professional professor. He makes jokes, tell stories, but tries to keep it down to business in the classroom.