Karl Castleton is one of the few Colorado Mesa University (CMU) professors without a doctorate, but a short conversation with the man reveals why he does not need one to teach and inspire young students in computer science. Castleton is a local and graduated from Central High School in 1985. That was when he really began studying computer science. He graduated from Mesa State College (now known as CMU). After his Associate degree, he spent a couple years mostly fixing things, specifically arcades.
“After that, there was an opportunity for me to teach people how to repair that stuff and do that. And that was almost more difficult than being a professor. That was forty hours a week of just lectures or labs. Planning and grading had to be worked around that,” Castleton said. “But it’s always been fun to teach people things they don’t know.”
He spent time in the National Guard, when the local unit was field artillery. He ended up teaching at the Colorado Military Academy that skillset as well. And after that is when he went to the national lab. He was hired right out of college to work at Pacific Northwest National Lab, under the Department of Energy. They handle nuclear materials – for bombs, for power, etc.
“What we were working on was the same collection of software that did this big transport. So, what I remember was helping groups of people use the software. Like one group was the Russians. We actually had to translate our whole application into Russian, we had never designed the software to even have some other language. We wrote it to run in English and be for English speakers, but they had issues they wanted to use this software for, so we needed to change it. It’s all very subtle, like you learn so much about your own culture and speaking… We had to be clever to figure out how to shorten things in a succinct way.”
But Castleton knew he wanted to move back to the Grand Junction area, where his family and his wife’s family was. Castleton met his wife while he was in college. She was a psychology major and now works as a behavioral analyst for School District 51. They had two children, a daughter who recently graduated from CMU with a degree in mathematics and a minor in computer science, and a son who is currently studying art at CMU.
“Software is knowledge that can take action,” Castleton says. Computer science is one of the few studies that truly parallels every area of our lives. Computer science is at the forefront of technology development and improvement for our daily lives. Castleton energizes students in many ways, not just for his time with the national laboratory, or assisting Russians utilize software, but because he himself knows that hard work and passion can lead to great opportunities within the industry.
