An Exciting First Day at GHC13

Today was our first full day in Minneapolis for this year's edition of the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing.  It's so nice to live the conference through the eyes of the students I organized to get here, seeing as it's their first time at GHC.  It's also nice to meet up again with all my women-in-computing friends that I rarely get to see outside of the conference.

Things got started with a nice welcome session that happened to include me going on stage with my co-chair for the Communities Committee, Charna, to get recognized for our efforts.  The opening speakers (including student members of the ABI boards!) also gave some great advice for newcomers.

Then came a highlight of our day: the keynote / plenary session that featured Telle Whitney (CEO of the Anita Borg Institute), Sheryl Sandberg (COO of Facebook), and Maria Klawe (President of Harvey Mudd College).  There was a lot of really good, frank talk about gender issues and facing them head on.  Karla, a GHC Communities Volunteer, blogged about this session - check it out!

There were a bunch of sessions in the afternoon, but I couldn't pay full attention to them because they were either full or I worked on my class's assignment to be released on Friday instead.  I did have fun presenting my Gram's House poster at the poster fair, making some really great connections with potential collaborators.

I'm really pumped to see everyone again tomorrow (for longer!), the sessions, my own talk, and most of all, the dancing!

Passing the CU-WISE Torch

I'm one of the original founders of our Carleton University Women in Science and Engineering group.  I stayed on the exec for a few years, stepping down only when I was pregnant, since I knew I wasn't going to be there the whole year.  I was the last remaining original exec.  The transition into new leadership was tricky at first, but I couldn't be more proud of what the new generation of CU-WISE is doing!

I put a lot of effort into making CU-WISE successful and, more importantly, sustainable.  From ensuring we had an up-to-date web presence, to creating a consistent brand, to planning outreach events and events for current students, to getting our mentoring program off the ground... I did a lot.  When I left, they needed more than one person to replace me! Despite my efforts in documenting everything, it was difficult at first for those who remained to get off the ground.

After a bit of struggle last year, CU-WISE is totally rocking it this year.  We finally scored some coveted office space, which the new co-chairs have set up very nicely.  They use it to meet in person weekly, something we never did before (but should have).  One of our past execs has offered to get the mentoring program going again remotely, despite being a post-doc at another institution now.  There are several really interesting new events planned, including outreach events that build off of what I had created in the past.  Things are looking amazing.  The only thing that's needed is a few more executive members to help the current team out!

So why do I tell you all this? Yes, I did want to share my pride, but I also wanted to encourage anyone else who wonders whether all the effort is worth it.  It is! If you're trying to get a women in science and/or engineering program off the ground at your school or workplace, give it all you can reasonably give.  Document everything so others can take over later.  And if you're finding nobody is able to carry the torch at first, don't fret - persevere, and you'll see the fruits of your effort in no time.  You'll be amazed at what comes next.

Event Idea: The Truth About Women in Science and Engineering

I recently came up with what I thought was interesting event idea.  Our Dean of Engineering had expressed some interest in CU-WISE coming up with an idea for a recruitment event that would attract the media and encourage high school girls to consider choosing Carleton in their upcoming university applications.  I haven't heard back from the Dean so I am not sure if this event will happen, but I thought I'd share the idea in case it helped any of you come up with your own.

The Truth About Women in Science and Engineering

The proposed premise is to be honest about what it’s like to be a woman in science or engineering. This begins as something that comes across as negative as we share the common challenges faced by students and others, but the idea is to show how a group like CU-WISE and all the other awesome things that Carleton does turns this all around. It is a risk to do anything negative at all (and it needs to be approached in just the right way), but there are two good reasons for this approach:

1. It will build trust in the students we want to reach as well as their parents. All schools are trying to sell themselves as a product, but how many are willing to be honest about the situation? It’s the elephant in the room, and our audience should appreciate our ability to discuss it in the open.
    
2. To attract the media, your approach has to be different. Sure, maybe you’d get a bit of air time for the usual outreach events, but they tend to be fairly similar to each other. Being willing to talk about these issues is not something that’s very common.

The proposed event would be a dessert reception held on the afternoon of a weekend. The reason for this is that a dinner would not only be more expensive, but require longer periods of sitting in one place (it will become clear why this isn’t desirable shortly). Choosing an afternoon on a weekend makes it easier for students and parents to attend since families need to get home from work and eat dinner before attending an event like this during the week. The great participation numbers at Go Eng Girl (held on a Saturday) proves that weekend events can be successful.

The dessert reception should include something to please both the parents (who are big influencers to their children’s choices) and the students. Offering beer and wine, if affordable, shows we are thinking of the former, and having cupcakes, cake pops, and milkshakes or smoothies for the girls should thrill the latter.

The main format of the event would be to have a short talk at the beginning to discuss the challenges faced by women in science and engineering and how CU-WISE and other Carleton initiatives help. This would be followed by a structured networking opportunity where parents and students would speak with current students, alumni, and faculty. Finally, hands-on demo and other info booths would be available during the last segment, when casual networking would take place. Dessert could be served in both of the last two segments or just at the end.

Possible Agenda

Time	Item	Reasoning
20 minutes	Talk: The Truth About Women in Science and Engineering (One or two guest speakers, depending on whether it will be joint between Engineering and Science)	As explained earlier, this is an opportunity to talk about the elephant in the room and build trust with both the parents and the students.  It is also an opportunity to showcase how CU-WISE helps by providing a support network and other great initiatives to Carleton students so they know they can expect to be able to overcome the challenges at Carleton.
40 minutes	Structured Networking: We will have a set of current female students, alumni, and faculty available to participate. There will be at least one person from each of these groups at each numbered table.  They will see three different groups of parents and students and will be asked to talk about their experiences at Carleton, including challenges they faced and how they overcame them. Each student/parent pair will draw three table numbers from separate bins, set up so that they get one table assigned to a current student, another to an alumnus, and another to a faculty member. In each of the ten minutes, the student/parent pair will sit at their assigned table and have a discussion with the student/alumnus/faculty assigned to that table. This will repeat twice so each pair talks to each type of person assigned to the tables. Ten minutes in the schedule is allotted for time taken switching tables, etc.	Students appreciate the opportunity to see what life is like for current students, what kinds of jobs they can expect if they get through the program, and who will be teaching them.  This makes coming to university much less intimidating, and if they find themselves connecting with any of these people, they are more likely to remember Carleton favourably as a place they could see themselves studying at. If possible, we may even be able to ask participants to tell us what programs they are applying for, and pre-match the tables they visit so they are able to speak to at least some people from that program or, at least, faculty.
60 minutes	Demo and Info Booths Demo booths should provide an opportunity to touch and try things as well as listen to someone from Carleton talk about the demo itself and how it relates to the kinds of things you study at Carleton. Potential demos might include robotics, satellites, brain dissection, interesting interfaces from HCI students, water filtration, etc. Info booths - such as one from Athletics - are important to emphasize the kind of balance you can have when you are a student at Carleton, and can show what other services are there to support students.	Besides the usual reasons for having hands-on demos (engagement, etc), they implicitly show the success of women at Carleton.  This continues to follow the theme on the Truth of Women in Science and Engineering in that we see what awesome things women here are really doing.

Why Computer Science is Relevant No Matter What You're Teaching

I had only half an hour to put forward my case. I wanted to convince the educators who attended a special CU-WISE event last week, Discover WISE, that no matter what subject they taught, they should throw a bit of computer science into the mix.

I started with a discussion on what computer science actually is.  After all, so many people have a misconception that it was likely these science and technology teachers did, too.  It didn't take long to get down to the real answer with this group (great bunch!), but it still had to be done.  After brainstorming, I started with my usual "big fancy definition" from Wikipedia:

Computer science (or computing science) is the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation and their implementation and application in computer systems.

("Bet that doesn't sound like something that would fit into your class!")

Then I gave my own take on what it was all about.  This is the same list I show during outreach or even my Introduction to Computers for Arts and Social Sciences course.

• It’s all about finding ways to figure stuff out.
• What can be computed automatically?
• How hard is it to compute?
• What cool applications are there? (Like video games, Facebook, and more)
• What’s the best way to set up a computer so it can do all this stuff fast?

Then I briefly showed them how computer science can connect to many different areas. In fact, I always say, give me anything you're interested in and I'll find a way to connect CS to it - after all, computers are everywhere! There's always a problem that can be solved with computing.

So why should these teachers care about teaching CS to their students? As the stats show, computer science is suffering greatly from a lack of females (and from people in general - some stats say that we won't have enough talent to fill jobs in the near future!).  One of the reasons seems to be that girls never find out what CS really is.  (I always ask the girls I do outreach with to tell me why they think there aren't more women in CS, and this is a reason they consistently offer.)

If students make it to the computer labs, it's usually to learn how to type or write reports or do research online.  Only about half the teachers present said their school even had computer science classes, and I'm willing to guess that among the courses that do exist, many of those teaching them don't have a CS background.  So even if girls were to make it into a high school "computer science" course, what impression are they likely to leave with? There's a good chance they will think CS is all about programming boring example programs that aren't relevant to them.

But if we can show how computing connects to the courses they are taking (you know, the ones they are actually passionate about), we might get a few girls interested in considering at least a minor in CS, if nothing else.

So I told the teachers about CS Unplugged, and showed how the various activities could fit into other classes from art to history to biology or physics.  In fact, I even have a document I made that suggests some of these connections (though I've thought of many more since writing it).  I told them they could ask for my help if they wanted to be able to do some of the activities on their own, or said they could invite CU-WISE to come to their classes and do some activities for them.

I know at least a few in attendance were convinced of my position.  Here's hoping that we can start infiltrating non-CS classes with some good old fashioned CS fun, and that some students will get hooked in the process.

Last Minute Preparations for our Celebration of Women in Science and Engineering

Tomorrow is our second annual Carleton Celebration of Women in Science and Engineering, hosted by CU-WISE.  This is an event I came up with last year after attending Grace Hopper.  I wanted to emphasize women "doing stuff" rather than focusing only on the problem of too few women in science and engineering.  We had research, outreach, and professional development talks followed by a speaker's dinner where some amazing networking took place.

This year, I wanted to take it a step further.  I put out a call to high school girls, inviting them to attend the talks and a speaker's lunch where they could network and be mentored.

Although most outreach events have hands-on components and we weren't able to fit any in to this event, our speakers know that their talks are to be geared toward the level of understand of these students.

As a result, anyone outside of your own discipline, be it the general public or even students in a totally different area of science/engineering, will be able to understand and get excited.  I've been encouraging the speakers to look at TED and TEDx talks for inspiration and ideas (particularly the video below from TEDxCarletonU).



During our lunch, we will also have some robots from the robotics club, and hopefully some Snap Circuits to play with.  Plus one of our talks will be a dissection demo! Cool!

Putting this event together was more stressful for me than last year, given how much more is involved with the venue and the inclusion of high school students.  (For example we almost ended up not having chairs for the audience!!)  But I think it's all coming together now.... which means I should get started on my own talk, "What do soap operas and video games have to do with women in computer science?";)

I'll let you all know how it goes!

Unlocking the Clubhouse for Women in Computing

I spoke at the most recent book club session put on by Carleton's IEEE-WIE, WIL, and CU-WISE.  At these sessions, attendees don't need to have read the book; rather, the presenter discusses what a particular book was about and why everyone should read it.  I chose to present Unlocking the Clubhouse: Women in Computing by Jane Margolis and Allan Fisher.

As part of my preparation, I went through the book and collected what I felt were the key quotes (I had actually read it the first time a long time ago).  It was amazing to see how much of what we do with CU-WISE is supported by the research in the book.  I'm sure I got many of my ideas from this source, but had forgotten where it came from.  Now I can point to it when I need to justify how some of our money is spent.

It was also invigorating to talk about what I wish I had time to do with regard to supporting local teachers in including computer science in their curriculum, improving computer science classes in high schools, and simply recruiting more girls into these classes.  Maybe one day I'll be able to concentrate more fully on that.

In addition to a handout that I made for attendees (see below), I put my notes together in a document that I am now sharing publicly.  I also included my own list of resources at the end.  I recommend taking a look, especially if you would like to see a shorter version of what we need to do to get more women into computing.  (If you're really short on time, focus on chapters seven and eight).  You might also be interested in the write-up I did about a talk on outreach by NCWIT at Grace Hopper.

[My notes on Unlocking the Clubhouse]

WISE Steps to Success a Big Success

Last Wednesday CU-WISE held a professional development event called WISE Steps to Success for a second year.  It's one of our flagship events, and was designed to give women in science and engineering the networking, negotiation, and confidence skills we aren't taught in class.

From the event description:

There's more to success than just passing your courses. There are a lot of skills to be learned outside of the classroom that greatly contribute to your future. And the earlier you start learning them, the earlier you can reach your goals.

Carleton's WISE, IEEE WIE, and Career Services have joined forces to give you the career building essentials and help you stand out. Whether you are actively looking for a job or not, this is an event you don't want to miss. This year we have also teamed up with local organization Dress for Success.

The event is free for Carleton's women in sciences and engineering, and will include a light dinner and dessert. You will hear from experts on networking, the importance of making a great first impression, dressing for success, confidence building, and negotiation skills. You will also have the opportunity to speak to mentors from academia and industry, to meet other students in your field, and to practice your skills.

This event was a huge success.  We had great attendance by both Carleton students and industry and academic mentors.  We saw a lot of networking happening during the breaks between talks, and the three speakers were amazing.



Best of all, I didn't even have to organize the event - four amazing Executives and Officers did it all! I got to play event photographer instead. ;)  You can see more photos from the event on Flickr.

The Speakers

Moyra McDill, a professor in engineering at Carleton, spoke about her experiences being the first woman to graduate with a degree from Mechanical Engineering at Carleton.  She told us about the "life rocks" philosophy.  She started with an empty measuring cup and added large rocks representing the most important things in her life, like family.  She then added smaller rocks into the spaces, sand in the remaining spaces, and water after all of that.  The point was that it's amazing how much you can fit into your life; just start with the big rocks, because you can't put those in after the sand/water/small stuff is already in there.



Next up was Andrew Moizer with an enthusiastic message about self-confidence and some tips on negotiation.  He encouraged everyone to step out of their comfort zone often.  I personally enjoyed his story very much, as he went from a big-wig in high tech to an entrepreneur with his own cattle farm. Talk about outside the comfort zone! What's really cool is his farm and cafe are in a small town my family and I visit frequently (it's on the other side of us from Ottawa).  I'm looking forward to visiting his and his wife's cafe soon.



Finally, by chance, a friend of mine was our last speaker.  Louise Grace came on behalf of Dress for Success Ottawa, whose mission is "to promote the economic independence of disadvantaged women by providing professional attire, a network of support and the career development tools to help women thrive in work and in life."  She told us about what Dress for Success does and then gave us tips on making the best first impression possible.  Her fashion advice was practical and reasonable, which I always appreciate, being someone who isn't all that into clothes.  I will always remember to check my shoes for salt stains before an important meeting or interview now thanks to Louise. ;)

Ontario Celebration of Women in Computing

Just in case I wasn't attending enough Women in Computing events (see posts on this year's Grace Hopper), I registered for the Ontario Celebration of Women in Computing (ONCWIC) coming up this weekend in Kingston, Ontario. Not only that, I even ended up being involved in two posters and one presentation. Not bad for a 24 hour event!


Kingston at night (a photo by me last year)

One reason I decided to attend this event is to force myself to make a research poster for my recent work on how cognitive theories help explain the value of augmented reality. (If nothing else, our lab needs more posters to hide the dirty while walls we aren't allowed to paint.) I'm pretty happy with the results of the poster, and will definitely post it on my portfolio a little later this year with more info about the research (just want to wait until the related paper has been reviewed).

The other poster and presentation are based on a presentation that the CU-WISE co-founders have given before at NCWIE and at Grace Hopper. Our poster is going to be pretty simple with some photos as discussion points and room to pin up our promotional and outreach supplies. The talk is only ten minutes and is going to go over some of our keys to success. I'm particularly excited about these because Barb and Natalia will be coming to present! Better yet Natalia is bringing her new baby. Yay! :D

Finally, I'm looking forward to a program that's a little different from other conferences I've attended. Being much smaller than Grace Hopper and the like, ONCWIC is able to be more intimate. We're actually going to be able to meet everyone personally if we want to (musical appetizers at 6:15!), and they're all going to be local! There's an evening social event followed by games and desserts (which counts as social to me, so it's like a double header).

Last but not least, I'm hoping to check out Fort Fright at Old Fort Henry before heading home Saturday night. This is going to be an amazing weekend.

The Impact of the Grace Hopper Celebration

In addition to my own blog, I'm writing a few posts for the Communications of ACM blog about the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing.

From my first post:

This year's edition of the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing is officially underway, and you can almost taste the excitement. Last night I had the opportunity to speak with an external evaluator about my experiences with the conference in an effort to determine what kind of impact it really has. I quite enjoyed the opportunity to reflect on my role this year and the previous two years I’ve attended.

Read the rest of the post on CACM.

Back to School (If You Ever Left)

Today is the first official day back to school, even though classes don't start until Thursday. I used to get very excited about this new beginning, but lately I haven't had the opportunity to enjoy it. That's because I never really left.

Still, I get to enjoy the hustle and bustle that is Frosh Week thanks to my involvement with CU-WISE. Tonight we have a booth at the clubs and societies fair, Carleton Expo. We'll be setting up our booth with some nice swag to give away and getting a bunch of new students to sign up for our mailing list. Tomorrow, a few of us will speak at the Faculty of Science orientation, where we will reach both males and females. A few others have already been involved with the special engineering events happening on campus.

It's a weird feeling, still being in school. Grad school is very different from undergrad, but it's still school. I still have at least three or four years of it, too. It's difficult to imagine leaving school for good simply because it's been so long. The longest I've been away was for my eight month co-op terms, and I can't even remember what that was like anymore. If I end up staying in academia when I graduate, I might never remember!

Anyway, I just wanted to wish everyone a happy back to school. If any of you are doing anything exciting or want to share how you feel about that first day back, I'd love to hear about it in the comments.

Outreach Campaign: Smart Girls Rock!

I've been leading an effort for our Women in Science and Engineering group, CU-WISE, to create a set of promotional items intended to be used during outreach events. We want giveaways that will be fun and that will leave the recipients with a positive image of studying science and engineering.

One of our Officers, Judy, offered to help design some buttons for our campaign. She came up with these images which are super cute!

As you can see the main theme is that "Smart Girls Rock!"

The next step is to produce a solo banner to put up at events. It should have some of these cartoons, possibly some photos taken at past outreach events, and a slightly longer slogan to go with the one on the buttons. I'd also take this design into a postcard which could have more information on what kinds of careers there are in science and engineering, or perhaps an explanation of the myths about these fields.

For the slogan, I'm thinking something like this, since there's often too much focus on the tools themselves (something males seem to prefer than females), rather than what you can do with them:

It's not about the lab coats, keyboards, or [something engineering related] - it's about making a difference in the world! Smart girls rock!

... but I'm not sure what to put for the engineering bit. I figure lab coats cover a lot of science and some engineering, and keyboards cover computing, but how to represent the rest?

If you have any ideas for the slogan or for the kind of material we should include in our postcard handouts, please do share your thoughts in the comments!

My Favourite Grace Hopper Memories

My fellow Grace Hopper Communities Committee members wanted to share our favourite Grace Hopper memories over the next few days, and we hope you'll do the same! It's so much fun reflecting back on what has made Grace Hopper so special to me. I'll pick just a few aspects to share here.

One of the things that has made Grace Hopper so exciting is the opportunity to travel to new places. I never would have imagined visiting Keystone, CO in 2008 or Tucson, AZ in 2009. We arrived early both years so we could look around and enjoy the surroundings. Lazing in the lake 11,000 feet up in the mountains in Keystone was beyond relaxing.

And getting to meet the saguaro cactus in Tucson was surreal.

But even more important than the scenery was who I got to enjoy it with. Both years, members of the CU-WISE executive managed to scrounge together enough money to make it to Grace Hopper (getting scholarships last year certainly helped!). The group of us got a suite of rooms both years because, believe it or not, doing so is actually cheaper for that number of people. The bonding that took place was so wonderful, and we learned more than we ever knew we could at the conference talks. I can honestly attribute the smashing success of our WISE group to our ability to attend Grace Hopper together.

I can't wait until Atlanta!

Do you have a favourite memory? Check out the sister post on the Grace Hopper blog to see how you can join in the fun!

Not All Women's Groups Are Harmful

After reading Hilary Mason's Stop talking, start coding article, I was thinking about writing a reaction. It slipped my mind until Terri Oda wrote her piece Women in computing groups considered harmful? She gave me the opportunity to reflect on what our Women in Science and Engineering group has been up to at Carleton University (CU-WISE), and why I think not all such groups are all that bad.

This is the part of Hilary's article that stuck out for me:

Many groups have popped up that support women in technology, like Girls in Tech, She’s Geeky, and many others (enumerated in Digiphile’s thoughtful post Why Including women matters for the future of technology and society). More often than not, these groups are the canned food drives of the women in technology movement. They make you feel better, they might do a little good, but they offer no fundamental change to the system that created the problem in the first place.

I remember sitting down with our Dean of Engineering to discuss CU-WISE budget opportunities. Dean Goubran has been incredibly supportive of CU-WISE, but said one important thing: he wanted to see less talking and more doing. He figures people have been sitting at conferences talking about the problem for at least 20 years, but the problem remains. What is it that CU-WISE will do to actually change things?

This was a tough question, especially for a group that had only been around for about a year. How would we know that we've made a real difference?

It's still hard to know for sure, but I think we're getting better and better at this all the time. For example, when I do outreach with groups of girls, I ask them hard questions about why there aren't many women in computing, and why it matters. Their insightful answers impress me and give me hope for their generation.

But we can't really measure how effective our outreach is. At least not yet. I do think it's important to get out there and make the image of computer science and engineering a more positive one, but we won't really know if our attempt is working until much later.

I do often hear a number of women attending CU-WISE events express their gratitude for the existence of such a group. I'm not sure we've saved anyone from dropping out or changing majors, but it does seem like a possibility. But this, too, is hard to measure (I suppose we should attempt to do a proper survey someday!).

So I look to the events we've been holding this past semester. Not a single one revolved around a discussion of the issues women in science and engineering face. The first was an opportunity to put our knowledge of technology to use in the IBM Extreme Blue Case Study Competition. Next, we gave our members the tools they needed to succeed in industry, teaching them skills like networking and negotiation at WISE Steps to Success. We had a smaller presentation on entrepreneurship and then held the very successful Celebration of Women in Science and Engineering.

That last one, the Celebration, had a lot to do with doing. Most talks were women simply presenting their research. As Hilary put it, we got together to "do science."

Based on all this, I think CU-WISE has done a good job of disproving Terri's theory to an extent:

Theory: The more time we spend on women in computing initiatives, the less time we have to actually get stuff done.

Naturally, some of our time must be taken away from doing if we are on the CU-WISE executive team, so we must be careful to balance the commitments properly. (This is something I didn't quite get right during my Masters but have improved thus far in my PhD.) I'm hoping that our group does a good job of encouraging our members to do the most doing possible.

And if we succeed, I think we will be far from harmful.

Celebration a Success!

Last week Carleton's Women in Science and Engineering hosted the very first Carleton Celebration of Women in Science and Engineering, and it was a great success!

I organized this event after being inspired by the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. The networking opportunities, the ability to find role models, the chance to hear the latest and greatest research being done by women in my field... I wanted to bring that to Carleton, even if it would be on a smaller scale.

My main goals were to showcase what the Carleton ladies in science and engineering have been up to, and to give us an opportunity for us to network, since WISE spans so many technical and scientific disciplines. I think we succeeded on both counts!

In terms of getting the word out about what we do, I had a media advisory sent out from Carleton's external communications office and managed to get an interview with the CBC, Canada's public broadcasting company. Terri and I prerecorded an interview with the Morning Show host Kathleen Petty to be played the morning of our event. In addition to the actual event, we talked about what got us into computer science, why women are such a minority, and what to do about it. Terri's boyfriend recorded the interview as it streamed online, and you can listen to it now from the CU-WISE website.

During the event, I saw so many new connections being made. For example, there were a few talks from biologists, who many of us engineers and computer scientists would never have had the opportunity to meet otherwise; some of them are even jumping on board to help out with CU-WISE. There were also multiple people talking about their outreach efforts, some from science and some from engineering, and now they want to work together. The networking continued during the speaker's dinner (which was covered by the event's funding).

I can't tell you how happy I am with this event overall. With the help of my fellow CU-WISE executives and officers, the room looked great and the day ran perfectly smoothly. Every single speaker did an amazing job. The quality and enthusiasm was nothing less than exhilarating. Thanks to everyone involved!

Carleton Celebration of Women in Science and Engineering

Ever since I attended my first Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing in 2008, I've dreamt of having a celebration of our own. Today I released a schedule of talks and started working on media announcements for the realization of that dream. On April 8 2010 we will be hosting the very first Carleton Celebration of Women in Science and Engineering!

As I wrote a couple of weeks ago on the Carleton University Women in Science and Engineering blog:

The idea with this event is to bring together Carleton women who are studying or working in any science or engineering discipline, and share with each other and the rest of the Carleton community what we've been up to. After the talks, the idea is to get the speakers together for dinner on us. The Celebration will be a wonderful opportunity to network and to socialize. It is important to show ourselves that we are not alone and that we do amazing things!

When I put out the call for proposals, I was worried I wouldn't get enough speakers to fill the afternoon I booked our seminar room for. But as the deadline came closer, the abstracts poured in, and I had to extend the booking to fit everyone into the schedule! Not only that, but I got the perfect variety needed for a true Grace Hopper-style celebration. In addition to research presentations, we have professional development and outreach talks, inspirational stories, and a round table to discuss issues facing women in our fields.

Check out the official schedule on the CU-WISE website!

Today I also worked on getting the word out to the general Carleton community. When I spoke to the woman in charge of external communications, I realized I could not only put out an invitation to the general public to attend, but I was also able to invite the media. Together, these two opportunities are extremely valuable.

While many people outside of Carleton won't be able to come to talks during a work day, the very act of informing them of this event draws their attention to the fact that there really are successful women in science and engineering. Those parents that didn't think these were good careers for their daughters might start to see otherwise, and the young girls themselves might find the role models they so often seek.

So if you're anywhere near Carleton, I hope you'll consider coming to a few talks on April 8th. Show your support for the women speaking, and learn something new while you're at it!

IBM Extreme Blue Case Study Competition

Why is it that out of 20 awesome students in last summer's edition of IBM's Extreme Blue program in Ottawa, not one was female?

That was the question the current program lead here wanted to know the answer to, and she came to CU-WISE to ask it. We had a nice lunch meeting where we discussed why some of us had applied once and never applied again, how girls can be turned off by things that sound too technical, and how we are known to underestimate our abilities and thus avoid seemingly out of reach opportunities like this.

Luckily, IBM wants to change things. They've helped us find a few female mentors for a career event we're planning for March, and we organized a business case study competition with them to promote Extreme Blue to our members. In fact, this latter event just happened yesterday, and was held at Ottawa U in collaboration with their WISE group (note that males were also invited to participate, but priority was given to the women). Judging from the awesome pitches our girls made, the competition seemed to hit the mark!

Teams had four to five minutes to pitch an idea to a panel of judges that would create products for 'smarter' universities. Just by coincidence, two out of the three finalists pitched a smart parking system. They explained how they would use sensors to detect what parking spots were available, and how they would provide several types of services, from the web to mobile to signs on campus, to help students, faculty and staff, and visitors get parked as quickly as possible. Both teams who chose parking as their topic had enough differences to make it interesting.

The third team devised a system that would record classroom lectures and allow students to choose the pace, camera, and so on. I can't remember the details of this one as much, so if you were part of that group, tell us more in the comments!

It was amazing what good practice delivering the pitches was for the students who participated. Some seemed really nervous, but that will only make it easier next time. Public speaking is a skill often ignored in science and engineering programs, but it's a skill well worth having!

I'm looking forward to seeing what else we can accomplish with IBM, and hope all my talented software developing lady friends apply to Extreme Blue this year, or in the near future!

Line Game at Design Tomorrow's World

This post was written originally for the Carleton University Women in Science and Engineering blog.

I just got back from Design Tomorrow's World. The event is very engineering focused, so being a computer scientist, I wanted to give them a bit of an idea of what CS is all about. I was invited to do an ice-breaker activity for ten minutes.

Normally, in these situations, I would use CS Unplugged activities. Unfortunately, I didn't have enough time to plan how to do these in only ten minutes, so I thought back to what I learned at an excellent outreach session at Grace Hopper 2008.

I ended up doing an easy little ice breaker called "the line game" some of you might be able to use one day. Basically, you have the group arrange themselves in a line based on how well they agree with a particular statement. This forces them to move around, and to talk to the others so they find the right spot (you can probably even bring in some sorting theory into it). I used three statements that lead into a bit about what computer science is all about:

1. "I like playing video games." For those who really loved them, I talked about my school's computer science games stream. For the others, I explained that not everyone in CS is into games (basically trying to show that it's not a bunch of male, nerdy hard-core gamers).
   
2. "I like math." I explained how algorithms are like mathematical thinking, but that you can focus more on design of interfaces and people etc if you want to.
3. "I have programmed or would like to try it." Everyone has to learn to program in computer science, so I said that it's worth giving a try since they might like it (then I plugged my upcoming mini-course they could sign up for - Computer Science and Games: Just For Girls!).

The activity seemed to hit the spot, as I had some educators get my contact info afterwards so I could come tell their gifted students more about computer science. I think the girls also appreciated getting up and moving. ;)

How to Use Social Media to Benefit Your Career

Carleton's Women in Science and Engineering's November guest speaker event last night was about How to Use Social Media to Benefit Your Career. With a general theme of "just do it," our guest speaker Natasha D'Souza of VirtualEyeSee explained how to get our names out on the social web, and why we should care.

After a brief introduction to some of the technologies out there (RSS feeds, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc..), the discussion turned to tagging. The basic gist of it is that if you tag your content, other people are more likely to be able to find it. That's a good thing, whether you want your company to be more visible or you want potential employers to be able to find you. The trick is to come up with some standard tags agreed upon by a certain group of people. For example, we might want to start tagging everything relevant to CU-WISE with cuwise.

Next comes social bookmarking, which includes sites like Delicious, reddit, and Digg. It can even include things like the Posted Items section of your Facebook profile. Here, we get to use tagging again, sharing and finding content relevant to our interests. Many web sites have social bookmarking shortcuts to encourage users to spread their content (when you notice a quick link to share on, say, Facebook, you somehow are more likely to actually do it).

Wikipedia was an interesting topic to me. Natasha said that she knows of people who have failed job interviews because of their answer to how many Wikipedia articles they've written! As Canadians, we have a real opportunity to contribute, because many of our companies' and institutions' pages are somewhat sub-par. The reason this one intrigued me is that I feel the community may be its own worst enemy in some ways; by flagging so many articles with all the things that are wrong about them (citation needed! tone is inappropriate!), many people might assume they don't have the expertise to contribute. Natasha's response is that this is a childish reaction and that we should just do it; I don't mind this for myself, but I do think it's a genuine roadblock in general.

Blogs can really help you find your voice online. If you have the dedication to keep a blog going but don't know what to write about, simply ask yourself what you are passionate about. Set yourself a goal, pick a time of day, and just do it! Writing on blogs has the advantage of being linked to easily, being indexed and searchable, and to provide automatic updates via RSS.

So why would you want to do all this? Doesn't it just suck up all your spare time?

Well, you have to decide for yourself how much you want to put out there and how much time to spend on it, but providing content puts you in control of your image. Whether they do it properly or not, HR people are Googling potential employers to get a sense of who they are beyond the job requirements. Do you want photos from that last party to be the first hit they find?

By contributing to group discussions, answering questions, writing content for Wikipedia, and so on, you are showing that you are part of a community, can problem solve, and are generally interested in what you do. You show that you understand the new social landscape is about sharing, not about me-me-me. How could this not impress?

GHC09: Sonora Desert Museum

Wow, have we ever been busy here in Tucson! It's late Tuesday night, and I'm only able to blog about Monday's activities. So there's definitely more to come. ;)

This year, I wasn't selected as a Hopper. Hoppers are conference volunteers who work for eight hours in exchange for free registration and a t-shirt. I didn't really need this since I won a scholarship, but was willing to volunteer anyway. I guess they wanted to make sure that everyone who needed the position got one, and so I did not. This is a bit of a guilty blessing in disguise, since I was able to do a little extra sight-seeing while some of our group did their Hopper work!

Barb and I used our rental car to check out the Sonora Desert Museum. On the way, we got a few nice shots at a lookout point:

When we first entered the museum, we found a friendly woman who taught us everything we needed to know about the iconic cactus called the saguaro.

Ever wondered what was inside a cactus? This. This is the skeleton of a dead saguaro cactus. I never knew they were woody inside, like trees:

The museum was also a zoo. We saw all kinds of wildlife that lives in the desert. There were some surprises, including a white-tailed deer. We didn't realize there was enough food in the desert for them. When we finally saw one, we realized the looked the same as at home, but were smaller. This cute mountain lion was slightly more expected:

This was the first day we were out in the hot sun, and we realized how HOT it has been here in Tucson lately. I think I got a bit of heat or sun stroke, because I felt pretty out of it the rest of the day. I also ate a bit later than usual, which probably didn't help.

All my Grace Hopper photos will be going in their own set on my Flickr account, so be sure to check back often to see much more than what I'm posting on my blog! And with that, I'll leave you with a few more cactus pictures. My next posts will be about our hike on Tuesday and the first day of the conference.

GHC09: Landed in Tucson

It's been a long time coming, but it's finally here - we're in Tucson for the 2009 edition of the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing! Five of the seven Carleton CU-WISE girls came today, while the last two are heading in on Tuesday. Our luggage is also a bit behind us. We're hoping to get that by tomorrow. (It figures - the one time I finally decide to just go ahead and check my luggage, they 'lose' it.)

(Shafagh, Serena, and Barb wait to leave the Ottawa airport at the beginning of our journey.)

Our flight was three legs, going from Ottawa to Toronto to Las Angeles to Tucson. Most of the trip was with Air Canada, which I love because of the seat-back entertainment. I watched two movies, one of which was called The Soloist, about a journalist who befriends a homeless musical genious. It was very good, but somewhat heartbreaking!

(The gang snacking in the Toronto airport.)

While flying over Arizona, the thing that struck me the most was how brown it was; it truly looked like a desert. Little stubs poked out of the ground like stubble - these were cacti as far as I could tell. Random humps of mountains protruded here and there, and very obvious and very green patches of grass provided the only break from the otherwise sandy looking soil.

(Cacti in Tucson! Yay! Photo from Barb.)

Although our luggage is still missing, I am very happy to be settled into our wonderful suite here at the Double Tree. The staff here are AMAZING. For example, when my laptop hard drive unseated itself again from all the travelling, they were able to bring me a small screwdriver to open up the back of the computer pretty much right away! They also hooked us up with the necessities (toothbrush, etc) because, of course, all that's in our missing luggage. They even helped us figure out our transportation for the next couple of days. Thanks - you guys rock!

Stay tuned for much, much more about our experience in Tucson and at Grace Hopper!