Computer Science
By Cynthia Anderson '99 February 24, 1996 Cynthia Anderson '99 is a linguistics major and computer science minor. She is a participant in WISP's Electronic-mentoring program, and has taken this opportunity to profile her mentor, Meg Williams, an operating systems project manager at Digital. I am a '99 planning on majoring in linguistics. I decided to participate in the E-Mentor program because I have been considering minoring in computer science, and I have been thinking about careers that would link the two. I wanted a mentor in computer science who could give advice about course selection, careers, etc. My mentor has done so much for me in the last three and a half months -- it's incredible! She is a project manager for operating systems (UNIX) releases at Digital. We communicate about three times a month over e-mail. I tell her about my courses and the things going on here at Dartmouth, and she... Well, she has been so helpful; I don't know where to begin. I am planning on taking Computer Science 5 in the spring, and she has sent me a three part
I asked my mentor to tell me a little about her experiences as a woman in the industry. This is her response: "When I first started working at Digital, the group I was in consisted of about 40 engineers, 4 of us being women. About 5 years after I started with Digital, the software engineering groups started to see a large attrition in women engineers. Apparently, many were saying the same things on exit, that the environment while not overtly sexist, was subtly hostile. "To their credit the Senior Management of the software engineering groups embarked on a project to understand why. Basically, they paired some senior women across different disciplines with some women psychologists from the Stone Center at Wellesly College. Out of this process came a set of recommendations to improve the environment for women, that included things like sexual harassment awareness training, changes to the performance reviews to include evaluations of team play and communication skills, being more aggressive about recruiting and promoting women, and lots others. In addition, the manager of my engineering group got all the women in our group together and said while the organization may not tolerate overt sexism, their may be covert sexism going on and if we felt there was something to talk about, we should. We did and we spent the next 4 years talking and making suggestions to senior management on how to improve the organization for women. "Both those things happened in 1986. Both have had a profound effect on the organization and on the women involved. We now have many more women in Senior level management positions. We are beginning to see more women move up into senior level technical positions, as well (although that has been slower to happen). The organization is much more supportive of social issues at work, e.g. maternity leaves as well as paternity leaves. We have a yearly seminar series that sponsors talks within the corporation concerning "women's" issues e.g. balancing career and family, getting beyond the "glass" ceiling, and health and financial issues specific to women. The awareness is there and it is not only women who are driving these changes. "Several of my friends have made major career changes because of the work we did back in 1986. Some have made personal decisions to move into more powerful jobs in the company. Others have left the corporate world completely choosing instead to make being a mother/wife their full time job. The group I work in today has about 400 people,
"While there will always be some sexism in the company, I feel I have a strong voice in where we are going as an organization and that I am valued because of my unique strengths. As an illustration to this: Once when on a trip, in a conversation with a couple of senior engineers, one of the senior engineers started to become a bit too sexually familiar. Feeling more than a little embarrassed and not knowing how else to handle this unwanted attention, I kicked him in the shin and walked away. Years later this engineer apologized to me for the incident, saying that he had stepped over the line. To me that was a small but personal victory for the acceptance of women in this profession. "The field continues to be male-dominated. However, I have always believed that computer science/software engineering offers a unique opportunity to women because it is a field on which we are pretty much level with men. It is a clean industry, there are no regulations around working with hazardous materials that might impact reproduction, and it can be done in an office or at home, which allows you to continue to work even if you have a child at home. It is a new industry [where] so many of those "old boy" rules have not yet been developed. We have only scratched the surface with what we will be able to do with computers, so the field will need to continue to grow at least for the foreseeable future." Dartmouth Coeds Sweep National Computing Awards By Anne Loomis, '99 January 11,1999 Each year, the Computer Research Association gives its Outstanding Undergraduate Award to one male and one female undergraduate--selected from a pool of nominees nationwide--who show "exceptional promise in an area of importance to computing research." This year, Dartmouth students won both. April Rasala and Marty Vona were nominated by professors in the Computer Science Department for their work in the cutting-edge fields of schedule robotics. They then submitted essays to the Computer Research Association, describing optimization and
April Rasala, a Computer Science major and all-Ivy fullback on the women's soccer team, has had a number of research experiences. In addition to her work as a student research assistant with Professor Cliff Stein, she has participated in the CRA-W's Distributed Mentor Project, and spent a term working as a software engineer at Hewlett-Packard. Rasala won the 1998-1999 award, complete with $1000 cash prize, specifically for the
"Bicriteria scheduling is theoretical computer science," says Rasala, "and in theoretical computer science, it's not necessarily the problem itself that will drive me. I like the challenge of thinking about it, and of discovering new things about it each time, really just trying to get inside a problem and understand what's going on. It's a great feeling when you discover something new. I love to sit back and think, hey, no one knew this before, and I've just figured it out." Working with professors Stein, Young, and Aslam, Rasala wrote an existence paper, proving that it's possible to schedule jobs to be done efficiently based on two criteria instead of just one. "You can think about jobs coming into a computer, or in a real life situation such as a factory or a mail room. You want to get them done as fast as possible," Rasala explains. "One thing you can try and optimize is how long it takes to complete all the jobs at once. But you also might try and make it fair so that everybody feels like they're getting their job done at a reasonable amount of time. Our theorem said you can show that it's possible to approximate both criteria so the results aren't the best in terms of either, but they aren't too bad." The theoretical nature of her research leaves it fairly distant from concrete applications. "It's not like we can immediately phone Microsoft and say you're doing that wrong, here's how you should be doing it," says Rasala. But the implications of her work could have an impact on the trend toward better, cheaper, faster computing. "With more information and better tools, we're going to be able to do this better." Marty Vona, a double major in Engineering and Computer Science, won the CRA award for his work with Professor Daniela Rus on self-reconfigurable robots. He started working for Professor Rus during the fall of his sophomore year. "She was looking for undergraduates to assist with the research going on in her lab. Lots of people applied, and I was the one that got the job." A self-reconfigurable robot is a machine that can change its internal structure to control its external shape. Says Vona, "You might imagine having an appliance that was a self-reconfigurable robot. You could tell it to be a chair when you needed an extra chair." "Or, if you want to build a structure on the moon, but it's too difficult to transport large machines up there, you could send a reconfigurable robot in batches of small units that can assemble themselves once they arrive. The more and more you get up there, the larger and more complex aggregate robots you can get." Although Vona is intrigued by the new and ground-breaking aspects of his research, it is not novelty that draws him to it. "What I really like is the process," he says. "I spend a lot of time working at a CAD station, designing the robots, and I spend a lot of time in the machine shop putting them together. What draws me to this research is basically getting to see all of that happen." Both Rasala and Vona express enthusiasm about their research experiences and would advise students interested in doing research in any field to start looking soon,
But more than anything, both winners recommend talking to Dartmouth professors. "I think anyone that wants to get involved in research has to take the first step and find a professor who's doing research that interests them," says Rasala. "I was really lucky to have gotten such a good advisor, because Professor Stein both introduced me to a problem that I had a shot at and kept me on track as I went along." Says Vona, "If you think you're going to get involved in research after Dartmouth, it's nice to start doing research here, just to see essentially what it's about, and to get some experience. It's also a lot of fun. It's a good time. I liked it." |