Computer science professor Andrew Campbell recently returned from his three-month sabbatical in Kigali, Rwanda’s capital city. While he was there, he taught high school, undergraduate and graduate students how to program smartphones. The Dartmouth sat down with Campbell to talk about his time abroad.
Why did you decide to spend your sabbatical in Rwanda?
AC: Well, it was not a premeditated decision that I was going to do that. It was sort of serendipitous. I went to a seminar where Lisa Adams from the Dickey Center [for International Understanding] gave a talk and she described her research, and one thing led to another, and I ended up in Rwanda.
What was appealing about the opportunity?
AC: I definitely wanted to experience a different teaching environment, and I work in the area of mobile technology where I use smartphones to understand physical or public health. Lisa was talking about her research there in Kigali and I thought that was appealing and I had heard about the prevalence of mobile technology in Africa so I was definitely interested in that. Lisa also talked about how Carnegie Mellon University had opened a teaching facility, and I knew people at CMU in Pittsburgh, and one thing led to another and I was literally chatting with the director of the university in Kigali and he asked, “Hey are you interested in visiting us?”
What was the most challenging thing about teaching smartphone programming to these students?
AC: Well, the first thing was I wasn’t quite sure what technology the kids would have. So I brought the phones with me. I brought 20 smartphones thinking, “How am I going to get through customs with 20 smartphones? They’re going to think I’m importing them or something.” So that was one initial challenge. Then when I got there and got to know the students and their capabilities, I [learned] they were quite good programmers [especially since they already had an undergraduate degree]. And the next challenge really was teaching them the tools and techniques they needed to have to learn to solve the problems I was presenting them with and they were really good at that, actually, and I thought, “I am teaching a fairly advanced class to students in a program which only had been going for three years.”
Was there anything that you learned while on sabbatical that you are hoping to integrate into your teaching going forward at Dartmouth?
AC: Yeah, they really love jokes and I’m a bit of a joker. So I’ve been teaching smartphone programing at Dartmouth and I’ve introduced more jokes to my class. I think what I brought back really was a real desire to engage these students that I met and talked with and got to know in Rwanda and I’ve encouraged at least three of them to apply to our Ph.D. program here at Dartmouth, and I’ve been working with two of them already on a research project on developing an application at the hospital in Kigali. So what I’ve brought back to Dartmouth hopefully, if I’m lucky, is that these two students apply to Dartmouth when they’ve finished their master’s degrees and then get admitted and come and do research here at Dartmouth. I think that would be wonderful for me as a researcher and great for our department and campus to have more top students from Africa. We have no Rwandan students.
What is the biggest difference between teaching computer science to students in Rwanda versus students in the United States?
AC: So Dartmouth undergraduate students are very smart, and teaching them is very demanding, and as a professor you have to be nimble on your toes, and technology changes a lot and you have to be very adaptive. So when I went over there, because it was a new school without a strong tradition, I wasn’t sure what level I could teach the students. I found that these students were at the exact same level, if not a little higher because they had already gotten their undergraduate degrees. So that was very encouraging. It’s not a stereotype to think Dartmouth is a top ten university and here’s a brand new institute in Rwanda, the kids might not be as smart or as driven, but I found these kids to be so incredibly driven and there was such a tight sense of community between them that there were strong parallels between teaching at Dartmouth and teaching in Kigali. It was unbelievable actually. These kids had the same community spirit and sense of competition as Dartmouth kids. It was a very similar teaching experience when I was in the classroom.
What was one of your favorite experiences while teaching abroad? Favorite story?
AC: I think I got to know the students on a different level than what I do I here at Dartmouth. In one sense Kigali was not my home and these students realized that and I would have dinner with them in the café or they would invite me to lunch with them. One of the nicest experiences I had was a little different. So I live in Norwich, so I take my car into work, but in Kigali people get around in motorbikes, so there are thousands and thousands of motor bikes and I had never done that before. So to travel around, I would hop on a motorbike and that was, in a strange way, like living on the edge on the back of a motorbike. Taxis were on motorbike and as a passenger you put on a helmet, get on the back, and take off. That was an exciting daily experience.
How has this related to your past work, especially in terms of the health and wellness app that you made?
AC: I met a bunch of Dartmouth doctors at the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in Kigali and I had this amazing experience, which was that I got to spend one day being a fly on the wall at the university teaching hospital in Kigali and I was shadowing a Dartmouth doctor, Robert Harris, around for the day. He’s a radiologist and I had met him before. What he was doing was that he was basically reading radiology scans every day and he would write a report. And what became apparent was that if you lived in the country a couple of hours away, then it takes six weeks to get an appointment because there’s only one [fMRI] scanner in the whole country. [We’re developing] an app so that the radiologist would read the scan, write a report and send it directly back to the doctor. And so that really brought together an interest in mobile health and a real gap in the health care. When the patient goes home and finally gets the result it might be too late so we wanted an application to fill that gap. And that development is ongoing with myself, the radiology and the two students. Rwanda actually has a really good health care system compared to a lot of the countries in eastern Africa. They pride themselves on that and they have fairly progressive municipal health, but there are still limited resources in the country.
What was it like being away from your family? Did they go with you?
AC: Originally I was going to go for more than a year, but in the end, I only went for one term. I had this really nice, plush apartment in Kigali but I literally spent no time there because I was meeting colleagues. It was like being a bachelor again, and it was a very odd experience.
In addition to teaching, how else did you spend your time in Rwanda?
AC: The students there were actually crazy about Premier League soccer. They had all had their teams and we would actually meet and watch soccer games on the weekends and that’s something I enjoyed. I did a little touring around. I visited the Congo, which is an amazing country. The Congo seems on edge and very tense. I traveled around Rwanda quite a bit, it was a very beautiful country. I also joined a gym and got a trainer and actually became quite fit.
Amanda Zhou is a junior at Dartmouth College originally from Brookline, Massachusetts. She’s previously been the associate managing editor, health and wellness beat writer at the Dartmouth and interned at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette this Fall. She is pursuing a major in quantitative social science and a minor in public policy. At college, she edits the campus newspaper, serves on the campus EMS squad and lives in the sustainable living center. After graduation, she is interested in a career in journalism or data analysis. In her spare time, she can be found running, cooking or trying to rock climb.
