John Majikes

Teaching Assistant Professor
Department of Computer Science
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

USPS Mail:

John Majikes, Department of Computer Science
Campus Box 3175, 150 Sitterson Hall
Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3175

Phone: (919) 590-6093
Fax:  (919) 590 6105

Biography

I wasn’t born in North Carolina and didn’t become a Tar Hell until late in life.   But I got here as fast as I could.

I am the proud grandson of hardworking immigrants who came to the United States to get me the opportunities I now have.  My mother wanted to go to college but was only allowed to go to cosmetology school.  I am the first in my family to go to college.  I started out as a newspaper carrier, dishwasher, bartender, toll collector and more.  College was my way out of a coal mining town and into a job that seemed more like fun than like work.

I have 35+ years of software engineering experience at IBM, Oracle, startup BitSight and others. Late in life I decided to pursue my dream of teaching an earned my Ph.D. creating a semi-autonomous computerized dog-training system comparable to a professional dog trainer.   And now I have my dream job of teaching.

Ask me about why I have always been a professional student? Why I decided to get my Ph.D. late in life? Why dog training? Or walking together at graduation with my son, the original Dr. Majikes.

Research

As I pursue the dog training as a novel idea for training diabetic alert dogs, my focus is on teaching tools that automate the tedium of grading, give students instant feedback, and hopefully improve active learning in large computer science classrooms.