VITA

Charles Arthur McCaffrey was born in Decatur, Illinois, May 22, 1954. His family moved to Springfield, Illinois, in 1955, and he lived there until he was 18 when he left to attend the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in September 1972. He then lived for 6 years in Champaign, Illinois, and then 27 years in Urbana, Illinois. He considers both Springfield and Urbana to be his hometowns. His friends call him "Chuck," "The World’s Funniest Comedian," or "that crazy SOB," depending.

He is currently a medical student at the College of Medicine and Health Sciences on the lovely island of St. Lucia, British West Indies. He was too old to get into a U.S. medical school—they say they don't discriminate on the basis of age, but they do—so he said, "What the heck?" and went to study medicine off-shore in the Caribbean.

He shall finish his basic medical sciences studies in the late winter of 2008 and then return to the U.S. for clinical clerkships and rotations to begin in the late spring or early summer of 2008. He intends to do a residency in Family Medicine and probably return to Lovely Central Illinois to practice where there is a need, perhaps in a medically under-served small town, rural community, or other place where physicians are needed, to pay back the remarkable gift of being allowed to study medicine so late in life, that is, his "extremely late thirties."

He is also considering doing a residency in Psychiatry. He would greatly enjoy doing a combined residency in Family Medicine and Psychiatry, and he is investigating the half-dozen or so such combined residencies that are available in the U.S. (Two such programs that interest him greatly are at the University of Iowa in Iowa City and at the University of California at San Diego.) Small towns and rural communities are generally too small to support a full-time psychiatrist, but a physician who is primarily a family practitioner and who is also board certified in psychiatry could serve both needs in such a community.

He is also considering joining the U.S. Army as an officer in the Army Medical Corps after graduating because he cannot stand the idea of young women and men in the Army needing medical and especially psychiatric care and not getting it. Surely there is no greater need for physicians than in the military. (The Army has recently raised its maximum age for volunteers to 42, and the age limit is waived for volunteers with highly desirable skills such as physicians.)

He worked as an adjunct professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the Department of English from 1999 to 2003, and at Parkland College in Champaign, Illinois, in the Department of English and Critical Studies from 2001 to 2005.

He also worked from 1974 through 2002 variously as a system administrator, a technical writer, a programmer, a software engineer, an instructor of software engineering, and a project leader at the University of Illinois Coordinated Science Lab, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois, Motorola, Intel, and SAIC, both part-time while in school and full-time afterward. He studied software engineering at Carnegie Mellon University's Software Engineering Institute (SEI) between 1999 and 2002. Software engineering applies true engineering discipline and science to the craft of computer programming. He is a certified instructor for the SEI’s Personal Software Process for Engineers, which is based on the work of Prof. Watts Humphrey (and here's another Watts Humphrey link), who is one of Chuck's heroes, and other courses in software engineering.

He has a BA in English with Honors and a BS in Biology, both from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, both May 1976. He attended the University of Illinois College of Medicine from 1976 to 1978, and as he has long wanted, he has returned to medical school. He also has an MA in English from UIUC, December 1981. He also has a Ph.D. in Comparative and World Literature, also from UIUC, October 1998. His dissertation examines Moving Words, Moving Pictures: A Comparison of the Portrayal of Alienation in the Novels and Films Death In Venice, Swann in Love, Under the Volcano, and Last Exit To Brooklyn.

He has also written on Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo; Roland Joffe's The Mission; images of women and technology in conflict in science fiction films; the portrayal of sexual difference in contemporary films; television situation comedies of the 1950s and 1960s; and the novels of the late William Maxwell, his favorite writer as well as his friend and mentor. He has also written a chapter in Rhetorical Designs for Professional and Technical Writers, edited by William E. Tanner. When he was a graduate student, he taught several courses in literature, cinema studies, and composition and logic at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Before he left for medical school in May 2005, he was working on a scholarly study of labor and capital relations as portrayed in contemporary popular culture entitled Why Is Rob Petrie Afraid of Alan Brady? as well as a book that teaches people how to teach themselves how to write.

He was also working on a novel entitled The Perfect Shade of Blue; a documentary film entitled Brotherhood about what fraternity truly means; a commercial screenplay entitled My Soul To Take; another commercial screenplay entitled Breaking Fifty; and a musical version of Citizen Kane. (Hey, don't laugh. He might actually finish it someday!) He also writes poems and music whenever his muses visit. However, all of these projects are in deep, deep background until he finishes medical school.

Also on deep background is a BS in Math & Computer Science from UIUC that he began when he was an undergrad but did not finish, and began pursuing again in 2001 but was unable to finish before starting medical school. He shall return to it someday and probably finish it via the online BS in Computer Science program from the University of Illinois at Springfield. He never quits. Besides, he would like to have a degree in the field that supported him for so long.

He has finished the coursework to complete an MS in Technology Management (like an MBA but for computer geeks and engineers) from Eastern Illinois University, and he will defend and deposit his master's thesis the next time he returns to Lovely Central Illinois. The title of his thesis is Attitudes Towards and Use of the Software Development Process at the Little Software House on the Silicon Prairie, a light-hearted title that plays on the Champaign-Urbana community being recognized as "Silicon Prairie" (remember ... HAL 9000 was born in Urbana!) because of the many software research and development ventures located there, and to compare it with but distinguish it from "Silicon Valley" and the other Silicon communities in the U.S.

He served five terms in the UIUC Faculty-Student Senate representing graduate students in the humanities.

He served as the Grand Chapter Adviser (adult alumni adviser) of his fraternity at UIUC, Eta Chapter of Alpha Sigma Phi Fraternity, for 24 years between 1981 and 2005. In 1989 he was awarded the Delta Beta Xi award for continued outstanding alumni service to the fraternity.

A dedicated (i.e., addicted and mildly obsessive) fitness runner, he has run two ultra-marathons (40 miles in 8 hours and 30 miles in 8 hours with a sprained knee and ankle, that is, he and not the hours had the sprained knee and ankle), over 20 marathons (fastest time 3:32, slowest time 4:30), at least twice as many half-thons, and many other shorter races. He is also a dedicated fitness weightlifter. He also swims, but not too fast or too far, and scuba dives, but not too deep and not too far from shore.

While a graduate student, he wrote film, play, concert, and book reviews for the Daily Illini, the student newspaper at UIUC.

As an actor in student and amateur productions, he has played Felix in Neil Simon's The Odd Couple; Tom in Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie; Tony in West Side Story by Jerome Robbins, Stephen Sondheim, and Leonard Bernstein; Curly in Oklahoma! by Richard Rogers and Oscar Hammerstein II; Karl Lindner in Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun; "Mormon Clergyman" in Moises Kaufman's The Laramie Project; and one of the thieves crucified with Christ in the one-act play A Very Cold Night, a role that some people said was type-casting. As a professional, he has played "man in a crowd of about 1000 other extras" in the film With Honors starring Brendan Frasier and Joe Pesci, part of which was shot on the Quad at UIUC.