Tell us about your name, “Gove.”
It is English in origin and is short for “governor”. They still use the expression in England. If you’re on friendly terms with your boss, it is common to refer to him as “governor” or “gove”. So in common use, “gove” means “boss”. My great-great-great-grandma Phelps stopped in Gove County, Kansas while crossing the plains and she liked the name. It’s a tiny place. The county seat is Gove, Kansas with less than 1,000 people. It’s a dry county: you can’t buy alcohol in Gove County.
Have you ever visited?
I have! I’ve always thought I should offer my services to set up their domain, and all I would charge would be the perpetual right to use one email address. Then I could be gove@gove.gov.
Why do you teach with a robe?
It turns out that every faculty member used to wear a robe all the time. It was the academic uniform up until the 1940s. Some universities in Europe still wear the robe. If you’re a professor at Oxford, you still wear the robe all the time. In the 1940s and 50s, after World War II, the professors in America started to ask themselves why they were wearing robes. The robes were hot, they itched, and they were expensive. So we in America just quit. Within 20 years, virtually no one was wearing the robe in America.
I bought my robe when I graduated with my PhD because I knew I’d need to wear it a couple times per year. That thing cost me $600. I did the amortization on that: if I have a 30-year career, it costs me about $20 every time I put it on. That is a lot of money! I thought to myself, “If I just wore it twice as often, I could cut the price in half.” So I started wearing it the first day of each semester. That meant I wore it three times per year instead of one. Then I came to BYU and wore it the first day to class. I showed up to class the second day without the robe and a student asked me, “Where’s the robe?”
I responded, “I was only going to wear it the first day of class.”
“Hmm…I liked the robe.”
“Really? I like the robe too.”
I polled the class that day and asked if I should wear it every day; they were unanimously in favor. I’ve worn it every day since then, which was in 2007.
What advice do you have for students that they wouldn’t otherwise get to hear?
God has something for you to do in the world (besides your home teaching). He has something He wants you to do in this world, and a big part of this life is for you to figure out what that is. What is your God-given mission? Don’t wait until you’re 80 to start thinking, “I wonder what my mission is.” Think about it now. God has given spiritual gifts to everyone. We look in the 45th section of the Doctrine and Covenants and learn that unto everyone is given at least one gift. No one has them all, but God has given you gifts to help you fulfill your divine mission. If you want to figure out your divine mission—and I encourage you to do it early—figure out what gifts God has given you, and how you can use those gifts to improve the lives of others. That will guide you to find your divine mission. If you can understand your divine mission and somehow connect that to your vocation—so that what you’re doing in the world to help raise your family and put bread on the table is somehow connected to fulfilling your divine mission—then that is a successful life.
Where did your initial interest in tech come from?
From a fire in 1979. We were staying at my Uncle Jim’s house in Salt Lake while visiting for the summer (I grew up in San Diego). Their house caught on fire. It didn’t entirely burn down, but it had a lot of damage. My dad was a builder, so Uncle Jim hired my dad to remediate the fire damage to his house. As part of the payment, he offered to teach my dad to program. Uncle Jim was a brilliant programmer and he hired my dad to work in his computer business. In 1980, my dad was a computer programmer, so we had a real computer in our home—a real business machine. My younger brother and I would read the instruction manual to find out all the things it could do. It was an amazing machine for the time. That was what got me interested in technology.
Tell us about your career timeline.
I graduated in 1994 with a Bachelor and Masters of Accountancy from BYU. I did consulting development while I was a student, and I kept doing it once I graduated. I began doing corporate trainings and started a company doing that. It grew to 15 employees who traveled around the world teaching the technologies of the day (server administration, database administration with SQL Server and Oracle). I was having a great time traveling the country. But then I got married and had a kid on the way, and I realized I didn’t want to travel as much. Right about that time, one of my customers offered to buy my company. And so I thought, “What would I do if I sold my company? Well, I’d go back to school and get my doctorate degree.” I sold the company and used the money to fund my PhD, which I did at the University of Minnesota. Afterwards, my first professorship was at Tulane University in New Orleans.
How did you end up at BYU?
When we evacuated from Hurricane Katrina in 2005, I received emails from people I barely knew who offered me places to continue my research while I was displaced. I had many offers like that and many family members who offered us a place to stay. But it was only here in Utah that I had both an offer to work and family who offered a place to stay. And so we came out here for the semester that Tulane was closed.
I guessed BYU remembered that they liked me, because when a position opened up a few months after that, they called me up and told me to apply. I probably wouldn’t have even known about the position if they hadn’t told me it was open.
Your teaching career has been around databases. Is that where most of your specialty has been?
Yes, databases and data modeling is where my heart has been, though I stumbled into teaching VBA and I’ve taught that a lot. I was in the accounting junior core and studying entity relationship modeling, and by that time, I had done a lot of application development. I had written data driven applications without understanding any of the theory and I had wrestled with understanding how to organize the data.
When they were talking about entity relationship modeling, I was rolling my eyes wondering what it could possibly be good for. Then they started saying that once you draw the picture, you can follow these few steps to put it into your code. I thought, “No way. I don’t believe it.” I followed it through blindly and thought, “It works.” That’s when I was hooked. I can pinpoint the moment. The funny thing is that I thought that day, “I want this to be my career.” How often do you have that experience and it actually turns out that way?
When did your interest in American history start?
Around 2001, while at Tulane University, I heard a talk about American exceptionalism. If you live in America your whole life, you may think that America is normal. But in the world, America is not normal. I thought that that was interesting. Historically, we’ve been better than we are now. But really, we are and should be a light to the rest of the world about how people can govern themselves. I didn’t really start studying history until 2011, and that came from participating in the Colonial Heritage Festival. I am now the president of the Colonial Heritage Foundation and it runs the largest colonial American reenactment event in the Western United States. It is held in Orem each year around the 4th of July. And we love to have volunteers!
If you could go back to any one year in history, what year would it be?
1776—to see the Battle of Trenton. The Battle of Trenton is interesting because if we hadn’t won, we might still be English today. This was when the American soldiers crossed the Delaware River. George Washington and his army left Christmas Day, and Washington knew it was a desperate move. He needed a victory to get his army to reenlist. For more than half of his army, their enlistment would end on January 1, 1777. If he didn’t get a victory, his soldiers would go home. Morale was low. They had lost and lost and lost for more than a year. If they didn’t win at Trenton, the war would be over.
Then they had this crazy victory. Not a single American was killed in battle. Washington’s soldiers killed or wounded 105 Hessians and captured another 750. It was the most lopsided victory of the Revolutionary War. The Americans then took their food, beer, and munitions back into Pennsylvania. On December 31, 1776, the day before the majority of the army was set to go home, Washington drew his troops together. He said to them, “I am going to offer an extra month’s pay if you reenlist.” The drums rolled, and no one stepped forward.
Washington was not an orator. We can count the number of times that he spoke (and history changed because of what he said) on one hand. This was one of those times. He said to those men, “My brave fellows. You have done all I have asked and more than could reasonably be expected, but your country is at stake: your homes, your wives, and all that you hold dear. You’ve worn yourselves out with fatigues and hardships, but we know not how to spare you. If you will consent to stay one month longer, you will render that service to the cause of liberty that you could probably never render under any other circumstance.” And again, he asked them to reenlist. The drums rolled. And no one stepped forward. But then a single soldier stepped forward. And another. And another. And then there was a commotion as soldiers were making bargains with each other: “I’ll reenlist of you reenlist.” They began reenlisting in pairs, in groups, and by entire companies. Most of the soldiers reenlisted that day. If I could see anything in American history, that is what I would want to see.
Written by Association for Information Systems
View original article here.