Shulman '85, '87 Has Been Helping Computer Science Students Since the Late 1990s
05/09/2022
By Ed Brennen
“What are you going to do next?”
It’s a question computer science alum David Shulman ’85, ’87 has been hearing a lot lately.
Still only in his late 50s, Shulman retired from Microsoft last May after a 25-year career that featured two acts with the tech behemoth, sandwiched around a six-year hiatus that led to a job with Motorola.
“I wanted to get my 25 years of service in at Microsoft,” says Shulman, who, to answer the question, hopes to do more traveling with his husband, Erik, now that he’s retired. He also plans to focus more on his philanthropy, whether it’s volunteering as the “unofficial IT director” at his church or continuing to grow the generous financial gifts he’s made to his alma mater over the past three decades.
“If students could do the work, I always wanted to make sure that money didn’t stand in the way for them to have an opportunity,” says Shulman, who started The Shulman Fund for Excellence in Computer Science with a $100,000 gift in the late 1990s.
Since then, he’s endowed the David E. Shulman ’85, ’87 Computer Science ACM Leadership Award (to support UML’s student chapter of the Association of Computer Machinery) and contributed to the Computer Science Department’s 25th anniversary fund. In 2018, he returned to campus for the dedication of the Shulman Library on the fourth floor of the renovated Dandeneau Hall.
Shulman joined Microsoft as a software design engineer in 1989 — just as it was ascending to new heights with the launch of Microsoft Office and Windows 3.0. He spent his first seven years working on email software that would become Microsoft Exchange.
“The industry has obviously evolved a lot. The internet wasn’t really a thing in the early ’90s, and then came the move to the cloud,” says Shulman, whose role with the company evolved as well, from hands-on engineer to more senior-level management. “Software has gotten so much more complex, with millions of lines of code. I became a big proponent of automated testing and really designing software for testability. Now, you see it everywhere with open-source places like GitHub. I saw a lot of them being born over the years.”
He also saw the corporate culture evolve. “We had our own offices way back when; that was the thing,” he says. “Now, of course, things have moved to more open team spaces that allow for more collaboration.”
On TV and in the movies, computer programmers are often wearing headphones and hoodies as they type away in trance-like solitude. But in reality, Shulman has noticed “a big shift” toward more collaborative software programming and development design. “Even so much as ‘pair programming,’ where you and a fellow engineer will sit together at the screen as you sketch out things,” he says.
Thanks to technology, Shulman says it’s easier than ever for computer science students today to learn how to work collaboratively, even when developing their own projects—something that he also sees as critically important.
“The stuff you learn in class like data structures and algorithms is super-important and builds a good foundation, but the collaboration experience and being able to work on your own project is very beneficial for early in your career,” he says. “With open-source tooling and things like GitHub, you can work with other developers and code-review your stuff. … You can publish a mobile game or put something on an app store.”
UML’s Computer Science Department was basically in version 1.0 when Shulman arrived from Peabody, Massachusetts, as a freshman in 1981. In his senior year, he started working part-time at North East Research Associates, a company led by one of his computer science professors, David Korff. As a defense industry subcontractor, the Woburn, Massachusetts-based company did laser physics analysis for the “Star Wars” missile defense system in the 1980s.
After graduating summa cum laude in 1985, Shulman became the company’s director of software development while working on his master’s degree at night. But by 1989, he was ready for a new challenge. Korff had died unexpectedly a year earlier, and the defense industry was slumping. One day, while skimming the pages of Byte, a popular computer magazine, Shulman saw a small help wanted ad for a software design engineer position at Microsoft. He was soon invited to fly out west for an interview.
There was just one problem, however: Microsoft used a lot of C, a programming language that Shulman “knew nothing about.” So, he read a book about C on the six-hour flight from Boston to Seattle—and was hired.
While it was an exhilarating time to work for Microsoft, the long hours and changing nature of his role eventually left Shulman feeling burned out. “I ended up managing managers who were managing managers. I discovered that at that time in my career, I didn’t enjoy that as much as debugging and writing code and designing,” he says.
He stepped away in 2002 to try his hand at consulting and to focus on personal projects, such as designing and building his own tech-savvy smart home. That project led to a connection with Motorola and a new job in 2004. When he was laid off in 2008, he was lured back to Microsoft, this time as a senior software engineer.
One thing that he appreciated about both Microsoft and Motorola is that they matched his charitable contributions to UML, enabling him to help more students. In 2020, Shulman joined UML’s Circle of Prestige, which recognizes donors whose lifetime giving exceeds $500,000.
“I think it’s important to give back. The young people there are the future,” says Shulman, who gets thank-you letters from his scholarship recipients every year. “It’s really heartening to hear about the struggles that they have, and how important school is to them and their families.”
So, when it comes to his philanthropic endeavors, what is Shulman planning to do next?
“My dream eventually is to have more full-ride scholarships in my endowments, not just the one-off kind of thing,” he says. “That’s my goal.”