Hello, I'm Dick!
Professor of Pain & Suffering
"I don't teach computer science. I teach students the true meaning of despair, one memory diagram at a time."
"I don't teach computer science. I teach students the true meaning of despair, one memory diagram at a time."
Everything you never wanted to know but were too afraid not to memorize for the exam.
I firmly believe that if a student isn't crying during office hours, I haven't done my job. My courses are carefully designed to maximize confusion and minimize hope. Every assignment is a puzzle wrapped in an enigma, traced through seventeen stack frames.
I received my Ph.D. from UMass Amherst, where my dissertation was titled "On the Impossibility of Student Happiness: A Formal Proof." Before defending it, I biked across the entire United States from California to Georgia — not for charity, not for self-discovery, but to put as much distance as possible between myself and my students. I hold a BS from Swarthmore College and a minor in Squirrel Behavioral Psychology from an unaccredited online institution.
Memory tracing, student torment, making simple concepts "abstruse" (an actual word a student used on RateMyProfessor to describe my Python class), writing exam questions with no correct answer, and what students across three different schools over 15 years have consistently described as "dry sarcastic humor." I prefer the term "emotional warfare."
I am the sole reason you have to trace code in CSE 115 and CSE 116. It's not because memory diagrams help you understand program execution — it's purely because I enjoy watching students suffer. I even published a peer-reviewed paper called "Memory Diagrams: A Consistent Approach Across Concepts and Languages" just to make it permanent. The curriculum committee tried to remove tracing once. I simply stared at them until they changed their minds.
A storied career of questionable decisions.
Witnesses report a flock of crows circled the hospital for three days. The attending physician later quit medicine and became a lighthouse keeper, refusing to discuss the event.
After a prolonged 13-year stay in kindergarten, Paul was finally expelled for "aggressively correcting the teacher's use of crayons" and "forcing other children to trace their drawings before coloring them in."
Originally enrolled as a culinary arts major at Swarthmore College, Paul accidentally wandered into a CS lecture and became obsessed with the idea that you could make people trace through code by hand. He switched majors immediately and never looked back.
Before finishing his PhD at UMass Amherst, Paul cycled from California to Georgia over the course of a month. He claims it was "for the experience." Former colleagues believe he was fleeing the consequences of his first tracing exam.
Convicted on 147 counts of "aggravated tracing" and "criminal infliction of memory diagrams." During his 23-year sentence, Paul started a coding bootcamp for inmates that had a 0% completion rate because he made every assignment a tracing exercise. He was released early for "good behavior," though the warden later admitted they just couldn't take his office hours anymore.
UB was the only institution willing to hire a professor with "23 years of incarceration" on their resume. The department chair later said, "We thought it was a typo. By the time we realized it wasn't, he had already rewritten the entire CSE 115 curriculum."
After demanding that baristas "trace through the espresso machine's state before and after each pull," Paul was permanently banned. He now brings his own coffee in a thermos labeled "Tears of CSE 116 Students."
Received 100% of the vote. The other nominees withdrew their candidacies after Paul made them trace through the ballot-counting algorithm.
When I'm not ruining GPAs, I keep busy.
My favorite outdoor activity. I've been clocked at 17 mph pursuing a grey squirrel across the academic spine. Campus security has asked me to stop. I have not.
My TAs are required to grade 400 tracing problems per week by hand. I also make them attend a mandatory 6am "motivation session" where I quiz them on pointer arithmetic.
I write tracing problems the way some people write poetry. Each one is a masterpiece of nested function calls, mutable state, and shattered dreams.
I have a curated Spotify playlist of office hours recordings. It's 47 hours long and categorized by midterm vs. final season.
I iron my lecture notes on top of mountains. It's the only hobby more pointless than asking me for a curve. (There will never be a curve.)
I have an artisanal collection of tears from every semester I've taught. The 2024 Fall vintage is particularly robust, with notes of desperation and a hint of regret.
Peer-reviewed by people who are also afraid of me.
Journal of Pedagogical Cruelty, Vol. 12, Issue 3
Read Paper →Proceedings of the International Conference on Unnecessary Complexity
Read Paper →Buffalo Psychiatric Review, Special Issue on Faculty Wellness
Read Paper →Memoirs of the Formerly Incarcerated Educators Society (FIES)
Read Paper →This one is real. He actually published this. The man academically justified making you trace code. 51 citations.
Read Paper →Real reviews from RateMyProfessor (3.6/5.0, 64 ratings). You can't make this stuff up. I didn't have to.
"did not anwer questions during lecture"
"A or F class basically"
"His class consists of him typing and students copying his code."
"Professor Dickson is a valued member of our faculty. Please stop emailing me about him. I cannot help you. No one can."
"He asked me to trace through the coffee machine's internal state during a faculty meeting. I'm a history professor. I don't know what a stack frame is. I still can't sleep."
"I like the guy even if I can tell he is not a fan of me."
Recognition from organizations I may have made up.
RateMyProfessor.com • 64 ratings • Tagged: "Hilarious"
National Association of Cruel Educators, 2024
U.S. Squirrel Athletic Federation, 2022
Guinness World Records, 2024
Alcatraz Alumni Association, 2023
UB Office of Institutional Research, 2025
I'm tired of answering these, so here they are permanently.
No. Next question.
Because I said so. Also because I spent 23 years in federal prison perfecting these tracing problems and I refuse to let that time go to waste. The real question is: why do YOU exist if not to trace through my carefully crafted recursive functions?
Which ones? The ones about me running an underground tracing bootcamp for inmates? Yes. The ones about me teaching a seagull to write Python? Also yes. The ones about me escaping through the sewers? No — I served my full sentence with dignity and a 4.0 GPA in the prison's correspondence MBA program.
They know what they did.
Sure. I've extended it by one minute. Use it wisely.
Everything on this website is 100% factual and legally binding. My lawyer (also a squirrel) has reviewed it.
My office hours are from 3:00 AM to 3:07 AM on alternating Tuesdays, but only during months that contain the letter 'R'. You must bring a hand-traced memory diagram of a doubly-linked list as an entry ticket. No exceptions. No tears. Okay, some tears.
Enroll in one of my courses today. Side effects may include loss of sleep, fear of recursion, involuntary tracing of everyday objects, and an inexplicable urge to chase squirrels.
Complaints can be directed to pauldick@buffalo.edu — yes, that is his real email.
Enroll Now (No Refunds)