Readers, please note: In the interest of providing information on this subject, we are posting the raw transcripts from the FCRC CRA-W workshop. This is an unedited transcript, but still should provide you with background information of use. The edited transcripts will be completed by spring 2000.


*** and has since left the field to become a social worker so I feel like I would like to write a book called the Tale of Three Women because we've all done things in completely different ways. So anyway, I got my undergraduate degree in mathematics at Cornell University, graduated in 1978. Parenthetically I was very influenced at that point by having Susan Owicki, who was just finishing up and taught an introductory data structures course. It really gave me a sense that she was great. You know, she was out there, she was doing it. It was a good influence in my life. I then went to Princeton University in the electrical and computer engineering department and I worked with * Garcia. He'd worked in distributive database systems. I was Hector's first student and I think I shocked him to his very core when I walked in in my last year and said I'm having a baby and therefore I'm gonna (tape fades out). And I should say that he was extraordinarily supportive through all of this. In fact, I got toxemia at the end of this pregnancy, I was bedridden and he came to my apartment to go over my thesis work with me, which is really above and beyond the call of duty almost of any advisor. So that was my oldest son Jeremy. He was born and I was very sick after that for a while. But I started immediately at the University of Pennsylvania in a tenure track position. Actually I think they fudged it somehow and gave me a visiting position for one year because I really didn't know what in the world I was doing and three years later, my second son, Christopher was born. So this is all sort of pre-tenure. Then in 1986 my father died and the only reason for mentioning this is that this was a tremendously stressful event, so I was commuting every other weekend to help nurse my father over a period of six months. And this was just before I was up for tenure. So I sort of see this black hole through the first seven or eight years of my academic career but somehow everything worked. And in 1989 I was promoted to associate professor. In the mean time I had also been switching areas slightly and it's not a huge paradigm shift to start looking at distributive real time systems. I was adding a concept of time in with some of the stuff that I'd been doing before. So a little bit of a career shift. And then after nine years or so and recently I was promoted to full professor and I should say by this time I've also added a dimension of * and database systems, so there's been a couple of paradigm shifts during that time. So I think I must be in the too much or not at all category here.

Now, I think that we all know, assuming everybody here, is everybody here associate professor or what yes? So is everybody here in the academic world? Yeah, everybody's in the academic world and you're somewhere in the pre-full professor position? So, I think that we all know going into it that tenure is extraordinarily stressful. We all know that there is all these hoops we have to jump through. We all know we've got to publish, we've got to produce, we've got to make contacts, we have to have an international reputation, we have to teach well and we all know that that's what's expected of us. But I think in some sense the move from associate to full is underspecified. It isn't a known procedure and if you ask people in your department what does it take to get promoted to full, it's not you don't always have such a clear sense of exactly what has to be done. It's not a fixed time period, so in some sense there's not that pressure that you feel in the initial phase. I think and these points will be brought up and dealt with in much better detail by my colleagues, this is somehow much more impressionistic but it happens when you've demonstrated a continuing research prominence and also leadership ability. This is key. And the ability to sustain good research funding but it's not a set time. And for some people they blast right through after they've gotten tenure and they sort of end up full professor in three years. Very direct approach. For other people, they don't make it or it takes them 15 years. And at Penn in particular there was a bit of a problem of sort of a roadblock. There had been a gap of I guess at least nine years since the last person in the department had been promoted to full professor and when the one ahead of me and then myself came up. And the problem with this is that their expectations of what it meant to be full somehow inflated with where they happened to be at that point in time and so they would look at our dossiers and say oh, but I have done X, Y and Z. And the point was well, this is nine years later. I would really hope that you've done a little bit more than some of us have in coming up for full. So at Penn, at least, there was a bit of a, we had to change perceptions on what and there had to be a bit of an aggressive sales job that went on to get our cases considered by the rest of the faculty. I think this brings up another point is that with tenure, typically there is at least in academia now, most departments assign mentors to help you go through the process of doing the right things to get tenure. And that this handholding is somewhat less after you've gotten tenured. You have to start taking a lot more initiative and doing it yourself and sometimes this actually requires convincing your mentor that you are capable of going to the next step. Mentors may or may not sort of be helpful at this point.

So some of the pointers that were useful for me as I came up, I think that sometimes women do not do as good as job at promoting or selling themselves then men. Of course, there are men who are also equally bad with this but you really do have to take it on yourself to sell yourself. People don't just recognize that you're great and wonderful because you publish good papers. They don't recognize that you're great and wonderful by necessarily being on program committees. You have to get out there and you have to convince people that you've done something that is really wonderful and really interesting and I think that Barbara alluded to this earlier. You may feel like well, it couldn't be that hard a thing if I did it myself, but you shouldn't let that out. And I should say that of all of the people in my department the person who gave me the biggest impetus to break this roadblock of do you move from associate to full was an assistant professor called *, who maybe some of you in the room know *. * is extraordinarily at promoting herself. She gets out there and she meets people and she talks to people about what she does and so there was one point where I had been very involved in getting computational biology and bio* going at Penn and I was we were gonna set up a center for bio* and there was a person, a male, in computer science, who was gonna take on the co-directorship for that. That was fine by me. I'm a team player, I'm a support player. I was very happy to let this person go ahead and take over the co-director. But * stopped me in the hallway and she said Susan, why aren't you co-director? And I said, well, 'cause he's more senior so he has more prestige, he can make things happen, and she said but you're the one that's done the work. You're the one who was the driving force here. You should do it. And so I did and that turned out to be a tremendously important thing for me to have done in coming up for full professor. Because there had been questions within the department of my leadership abilities, which totally floored me when I heard this, because of all the things that anybody could ever criticize me about, I could list five things that I'm not particularly good at but management and leadership is somewhere that I don't have any difficulties. So it was a perception of the department that had to be changed and taking this one seemingly to me small step really, really helped, so I'm very thankful to * for having much more common sense than I have.

I think another thing that many of us do is because the push for tenure is so hard, it's stressful, that you tend to slack off a little bit after being promoted. You tend to have a year or two where you're just resting. You're trying to get your feet back on the ground. That's fine, just realize it might take another year or two for you to go up for full professor. If you have expectations of doing it very quickly, you can't afford to take a slack off period.

Another thing that seemed to be tremendously important is while at tenure time people want to see that you have a research reputation, international research reputation, for promotion to full it seems that letters from ** university are extraordinarily important and by virtue of the fact that I had gone involved with *, there were all sorts of people in the medical school and school of arts and sciences who were very supportive of what I was doing. This was very helpful. They want to see that you're not narrow and one way of showing the breadth of impact of your work is to get very strong letters, not just outside the school, but from within the school but from different departments within different schools within the university. You need to show the ability to assume leadership and so taking responsibility within your professional societies is useful. This point is interesting. You may think that working closely with a senior person is difficult or bad or detrimental in some ways before you go up for tenure, but this is actually still difficult after tenure. So when you are going for promotion at any level, what they want to see is independent work that you have done. If you publish with more junior people, somehow the work is ascribed to the more senior person and so it's O.K. somehow if you've been working with more junior people, it shows that you're able to nurture and promote but if you work with more senior people, even if the work is your own, it can cause some questions. So you need to show some independent work and this continues post-tenure. Another thing that I've seen lately with cases that have come up is that if you switch fields it's just gonna take longer because you have to show that you're established in the particular field, so you have to be careful there.

Some of the benefits of being a full professor, I have really enjoyed the slacking in pressure. I feel like I'm doing some of my best work now but I feel that it's not because I have to do it. I feel it's because I really enjoy doing it. You can take more risks in research. Sometimes if you know that you have to get publications out you tend to choose subjects that you know are gonna make it into the conferences. I have found recently I've been working on a topic that hasn't actually been published the first couple rounds. I'm not worried about it. I believe it's good work. I believe that conferences are quite faddish and it's not a particularly hot topic right now. This would have really worried me three years ago. Now I believe that what I'm doing is good. I believe it'll make it eventually. The question of benefits of being a full professor, it seems like immediately you get promoted then everybody starts wanting you to do things, like department chair or whatever else so whether you perceive this to be a benefit or not depends on what you want to do with the rest of your life. It is true that a number of administrative positions open up to you that might not have been there before.

Some of the challenges that I think are, there really is an increased responsibility to take care of the department, to take care of all of the junior faculty, which are much bigger, because now you're two levels up instead of just one, and so that becomes, it's good but it's it's own set of pressures. You also as your research enterprise gets bigger then you spend much more of your time writing grants to support that research enterprise and sometimes you wonder is it worth it? Maybe I should just pare down a bit. So you have a bigger research enterprise. Also the politics get a little bit more intense.

My last point before I sit down and let my colleagues do a much better job at presenting the process, is there a glass ceiling? And I have to honestly say that I have never, ever experienced this personally. I'm not saying it doesn't exist, I'm just saying that I have always felt enormously supported. I've always felt that there are more opportunities out there than I can personally take. And it's probably luck but just as a point of perspective at Penn, currently we have a female president, Judith Roden. Judith is very effective. I like her an awful lot. I see many of the things that she does and I've learned from her so I think it's very impressive. Also, there are a lot of women, more women now, who have been department chairs. **, who is now the director of * at NSF, she was department chair. In fact, when I was coming up for tenure she was department chair and that's just at the University of Pennsylvania. Currently, you've got Jeanne Ferrante at UCSD and Kathy * at Columbia University and these are just the ones that I could think of very quickly. I'm sure there's many others that are out there. Not only are they terrific, these women are all tremendous role models and maybe they've broken the glass ceiling, if there was one. I think they've shown that you could do it too. Kathy and Jeanne are in my era, in some sense, and it's given me a lot more self-confidence that I, too, could move into those positions and do well. So that's my perspective.

?: O.K. so I'm gonna continue in this sort of personal retrospective manner that we've decided to adopt here, and I am gonna put copies of my slides up on my web site, so give me until the end of the week after * is over and I'll have that for you. Because in reality the only advice we can really give people about how the process works is what we've observed ourselves and what we've observed in our own institutions. So I'm a faculty member at the state university of New Jersey. It's a large state university and it reflects the kinds of things that happen at a research-oriented university. In terms of my personal history, I graduated with a degree in applied math because there wasn't computer science in 1969 at Brown. I went on directly to Stanford University and spent two years there, actually got an ABD but that at the time I thought I wanted to study numerical analysis and after looking around for thesis topics in that area, decided no, that wasn't what I wanted. So then I switched coasts and came back to the east coast from Stanford and got a job at Bell Labs at the luckily center where they wrote the portable * compiler, where they wrote Unix and they were doing a lot of really interesting things during this period and I served as an associate member of staff because member staff meant you had a doctorate, so masters degree people were associate members of staff. I got a lot of opportunities during my Bell Labs career to get started on learning what it was like to do research in systems, to do research in software tools that were there to help programmers in programming environments and I got a little ambitious. I had changed fields and during this period I also gave birth to two children and finally my desire to try to get more formal training in my new choice of fields, that is in compilings and programming languages, coupled with the fact that getting good daycare for a one-year old and three-year old proved to be somewhat impossible in central New Jersey at the time led me to go back to graduate school and I went back to Rutgers. After a couple of years of taking courses part time and doing independent studies with professors there, I got the bug to try to make a career switch to go from research/industry to a teaching profession, to a university teaching profession. So I ended up going sort of half time the first two or three years and full time the last two years and finished my dissertation at Rutgers. Again, luckily for me 1982 was a real bulge time in computer science in terms of enrollment, and so I was hired on, allowed to stay at my own university and hired on as faculty, which for my personal situation with a spouse with ten years experience in industry at that time and kids in school and all it was very, very fortuitous. It's been a good thing since. I spent the usual six years and in 1988 got tenure and then in 1994, which was for my department "one year early" I went up for full professor. So what I'm gonna do in my comments is to tell you or to focus on the how, because in my case I went up for full professor after taking my * around to several senior people and asking what do I need to do to become a full professor and in all these cases after four or five years, everyone said well, I can't tell you anything more to do, so I decided if there was nothing more to do I should then go up, right? But if I hadn't taken the initiative and done that I may still have been there now as an associate professor. I'm not in a situation where I think the folks who were in charge at the time paid enough attention to those of us who were associate to full. Mentoring went on for junior people but not so much for this intermediate place.

So how do you do it? There's nothing on this slide that people who have attained tenure at a university don't know already. You do what you've been doing to obtain tenure, you just do more of it and you do it better. That's it, that's what you do. That's sort of the standard, the standard story that you hear. You worry about your reputations or you publish. You obtain grant support, successive grants. You graduate Ph.D. students and you carry on a coherent program of Ph.D. research in some area. My own area is in compiled time program analysis for software tools and compilers. You attain a serious reputation outside of the home institution. One way to do that and to be selected for professional service is to take advantage of opportunities, both to be on any panels for reviewing, papers, to be on program committees. You try to make your professional service help you gain better understanding and knowledge of research and of your chosen area. So you try to do this service that has work to teach you what other people are doing at the same time, so it serves both goals and I'll come back to that again. You make sure that you contribute to both undergraduate and graduate teaching. Some of the things I'm telling you are my personal philosophy and some of them are things you have to do but I do think on a university level nowadays, when you go up for promotion, they want to see a commitment to teaching. When you're going up to promotion to full professor they want the leaders of their university to have some commitment to teaching as well as research.

And another good thing is to do what I did, that is ask advice of senior faculty. Find out from senior faculty at your institution what they think you have to do to get promoted, what they think in your * needs improvement. They're your resource.

So, how do we go about this, in more details? Solicit invitations to present your work. Jeanne already talked about this. When you go to a conference and it's in a city where you have a colleague at a university or college, send e-mail to that person, try to visit the school. Try to give a talk. Every time you present your work to people, you better crystallize in your mind what the key insights are, what the real important aspects of your work are. So you should take advantage of that opportunity. Reference letters are very, very important to promotion as you go up the ladder. You can't underestimate the importance of reference letters from qualified senior people in the field. Make it easy for them to know your work. Meet them at conferences. Sit down and talk to them about your work. Offer to come and give a talk about your work at their research institution, at a laboratory or at a university. The emphasis here is that you have to start the process but often people are very open to having you come and to expose themselves and their fellow researchers to new work in the field. The important thing is to make it easy for the reference letter writer to know about you and to get interested in what you do. Respond positively. Now this is not a public service announcement. When you serve on a NSF panel you learn, you get to see maybe 20 proposals. You can easily then pick out what's good about a proposal, what's bad about a proposal, how to write a convincing proposal. What did somebody do? What style did somebody use to convince you they know what they're doing and they have some direction in the work? This is what I mean by learning from colleagues. Not that you're going to steal the ideas in the proposal but there are various aspects of our work where we have to learn the craft by looking at other masters and looking at other journeymen and this aspect of serving on a panel and also understanding the process of getting a grant. When you go to Washington and serve on a panel or when you serve as a reviewer for a journal submission you begin to understand how the review process works and you begin to understand how you have to convince, what you have to convince people of in terms of your own research. How to get your ideas through and to get them validated with grant support. I can't overestimate, I can't overemphasize that you have to learn from others here and that's the way that you do it.

Seek advice from your own faculty. There are often people at your own institution that can give you good advice about funding opportunities, about new programs starting up and sometimes they can serve to introduce you to people that are key people in the area.

So how do we go about doing this, yes, you actually go up to people who have given an interesting talk at a conference or someone that you want to make and you talk to them. You ask them a question. You've read one of their papers. You talk about it. You talk about how it relates to something you do. You are an "in their face" younger researcher. I think that when I was working on this, now I suppose I'm just in your face all the time with people but when I was younger it was harder to do this and I had a goal of going to a meeting and meeting three new people whose work I admired, who I wanted to get to know, whom I wanted to make some sort of contact with. And you have to force yourself to do it but it's very important.

Another thing you can do which is quite helpful to keep up in the field because we're all dreadfully behind in our reading of conferences and journals is to start a weekly reading group with your graduate students. Again, this is from the perspective of being at a research university. So in this group we read papers from conferences, we read papers from journals, we practice research talks and it's very, very helpful to read a paper with others and you're sitting there as the faculty person and you get to hear all these papers. Of course you have to do papers occasionally but you also get to direct the reading and try to make sure that students in your group are really keeping up in the areas that you think are most relevant for the research that you're doing. It builds a group, a sense of community amongst the students, it gets the students being not afraid to ask one another questions about things that they don't understand. It really can be very, very positive for your group.

Be careful of the administration. Susan already talked about this. There aren't enough of us at the university and there are university-wide committees and they have to have a certain number of people from the sciences and the arts and a certain number of women and a certain number of senior people, and if you're a senior woman you start getting picked upon. Choose the things you want to do. Pick areas where you care about things. Then choose to be on those committees and don't be afraid of the two-letter word. It's allowed. Men say it, too. No, I'm doing too much. Use that effectively. I don't want to sound preachy, I'm sorry. I feel like I'm sounding preachy here.

O.K. So make sure you teach graduate students, graduate as well as undergraduate seminars so that you can learn about some new stuff.

What to avoid? We've already talked about switching. The reason switching is hard, is bad, is not that it's bad to be flexible and to have good ideas in many areas but rather that it's hard to build up the reputation in a second area you switched to quickly enough so that you can get the reference letters in that area. It's hard to publish quickly in that area sometimes. And so that's why it has a * effect if you're going for a promotion quickly after you switch. Try to avoid spending too much time on teaching. I'm absolutely serious about this. As you go on in the teaching profession you can learn tricks for maintaining quality in your teaching but reusing material, reusing the way in which you prepared a course, keeping things online so its easy to prepare the slides the next time because you're just sitting there in PowerPoint and erasing one bullet and putting it a new one rather than creating a whole new presentation. Ask to teach the same course twice in a semester. You make really effective use of your prep time that way. And we still have to worry about this where we are in our careers as much as the more junior people do.

This one is a political one. Pick your battles. Pick when you're gonna fight for things. If someone in the senior faculty, senior to you, is gonna vote on your promotion, is taking a stance or when you're trying to ask for advice, at least thing twice when you're going against that person's advice and try to understand, maybe seek alternative advice from a second person before you just decide well, that's just ridiculous, I'm not gonna do it.

So what are the challenges? Maintaining a coherent research direction while responding to new interests and ideas. For someone in systems like myself, I consider languages and software engineering systems, this is really hard because the field is changing so quickly and you have to maintain some kind of multi-year research plan so that you have students you start now who three years from now will finish their dissertation and that's not so easy to do, given the way that technology is changing. Obtaining funding, I complained about that already and others have complained about it and we'll probably all complain about it because being a full professor means they expect this. Advising graduate students, that continues to be part of the job. Mentoring junior faculty. I personally feel this is part of a senior person's role. And having more responsibility in the department's future. This can be quite exciting. Challenging but quite exciting, because every layer that you go up in university level uncovers yet another layer of interaction among your fellows which were blissfully hidden from you when you were not promoted up to full professor or not promoted up to associate professor.

The benefits, I think number one is you've done it. You're in, you're here, this is the top of the university pinnacle and it really gives you a great deal of confidence to do things. Like Susan said, to work on areas you feel don't have to have payback quickly, to work on some sort of curricular area that you really want to do and you feel it should be done and you want to take a year or two and do that, it's O.K. It's not gonna affect your research productivity slowing down is not gonna affect your future. It is a benefit to have more say in the department and it is a benefit to participate in panels, invited talks, editorship, to feel like you're influencing the field.

So what are the special challenges? That's my euphemistic term for why is it hard? Or what is it that's not a benefit, that's sort of a negative aspect? You have to continue to get career advice. When you are a woman in a field where there are so few women, like our own, you have to continue to look for support from other senior people in the field, especially women and you have to continue to get career advice as to what might be appropriate things for you to be doing and worrying about. Luckily in our profession there's sort of informal networks I think among many of the senior women. Sister's Academic is the e-mail newsgroup is one vehicle and many people end up making contacts through various professional activities. It can be a special challenge to interact with faculty who are not comfortable with women colleagues. Again, I'm reporting this from my personal point of view. For example, in my capacity as chair of *, I had occasion to go overseas and try to arrange conferences where * was gonna take conferences overseas and sometimes the senior people in Europe who are male, some of them are I say uncomfortable, they're not used to women colleagues. Period, simple. They're not used to women at their level, they're not used to women who are heads of laboratories or department chairs and until they kind of figure out what the social action should be it can be a little uncomfortable and my approach is you are who you are and you just act the same and eventually most of these people come around to feeling a little bit better about interacting with you and you don't feel that it's stilted or it's kind of uneven. And you can sometimes get this in our own country among some faculty but luckily that's changing to some extent. Making sure you get enough resources. This is what you have to do as a senior faculty person, as a full professor whether you're a man or a woman it just may be a little harder for women. You should all go to the web site and print off the MIT report. You should all read this report because it's very revealing. Which web site? Oh, you would ask me this. I don't have something to write with. It's web.mit.edu/fnl, that's where it is. So basically this reports on a committee of administrators and senior women at MIT and then from the school of science and it talks about how space is allocated, how salary increments are given. Computer time on resources that are fairly scarce. Opportunities to represent the department and show off your work in terms of industrial visitors or that kind of thing, or having MIT faculty go out into the community. These sorts of issues happen in every department. I'm sure that the MIT department, MIT administration has just been basically gutsy enough to report in public what everybody knows happens everywhere. You have to make sure that you get what you deserve to do the work and what you have been working for, you get your due.

Finally, I think supporting women students with a positive attitude towards our profession, I believe is one of the challenges for us as female professors and as female senior women. I have become more active in doing this in my own professional life lately. There is funding you can get from NSL, which is add-on supplemental funding where you can hire undergraduate students in the summer. I always try to use the * funds for women students when I can. You can encourage women to do independent studies. You can form a women in computer science group at your university. If you go to my web page you'll see what we've done at our university. Really, it hasn't taken very much work because the women were sort of ready for this and all I do is just sort of be the titular head and try to make contacts with the people we have come in for the career panel. You can take part in various * activities for mentoring women. I can't overemphasize what I think is the importance of having us in front of women students and having us try to encourage women students to do or to try to do what we have done.

I think I've gone over my time so I'm not gonna talk about this slide but that's my take, yeah, I think it's there but I think it's pushable or breakable, I guess is the point.

?: So I don't think we really do disagree, maybe we do disagree.

?: I think it's a question of proportions.

?: Alright. So I thought I would give you my time line and just tell you a little bit about myself. Let's see. I got my Ph.D. from the University of Washington in 1979 and at that point in time I was a theoretician, so you know, people have really been talking about kind off and on in the last two panels about research topics but let me say that most people I say have actually changed research topics at least once if not a number of times throughout their research career, if they've been at research long enough. Lots of times it's sort of a gradual evolution rather than you start one day you're a theoretician, the next day you decide to be a software engineer or something. I think that people do evolve in their interests over time and that certainly was my experience. I started out as a theoretician. By the time I was promoted to associate professor, I had kind of moved into parallel processing. At first I started looking at theoretical problems in parallel processing, having to do with mapping and scheduling and then I got into software development and tools and programming environments. By the time I was full professor I had changed my interests slightly again, to kind of stay with the mapping and scheduling but then in sort of an environment where the resources were distributed. They were parallel but they were still distributed, so kind of grid computing or * computing or heterogeneous computing. It goes by many different names these days. So I think my experience was not so atypical. I think lots of times people move throughout their career, kind of evolve from one area to the other. But I heartily concur with Barbara and Susan in that you really need to demonstrate a track record when you go up for full professor, so you had better make sure that you really have a track record in the area that you're gonna go up for full professor in.

Just some other details, I was assistant professor at Purdue University. I met my husband there and we were the * two body problem and we ended up at UC San Diego in 1987. I had my daughter the year I went up for tenure, at 35, which was wonderful. I was promoted to associate professor and then I had my son at 37 in 1988. I was promoted to full professor in 1993. So that's kind of been my timeline.

O.K. So let me tell you a little bit about advancing from associate to full at UCSD. It sounds like we have a bit of a different situation then you two have. And it's a situation that I very much like about UCSD. Every place has its pros and its cons but one thing I like a lot is that you really march up the promotion ladder in a very clear-cut way. Pre-full professor, you have a merit promotion every two years. That's sort of a full file merit promotion when you go up for tenure anyway and when you go up for full, after full you sort of march up your promotion ladder every three years, assuming you're doing all the right things. You usually go from one step to another. For us, you start at associate 1, 2, 3. You go to either associate 4 or full professor and the more common thing if you're doing all the right things is full professor and if things are a bit problematic you might go to associate 4, at least I think that's true, right Jeanne? So the idea is that when you go from associate to full it's similar in some sense to the tenure process. You need complete documentation of everything, your research activities, your teaching activities, outside letters are really critical, as was said before. For us there's a vote of the faculty senior to you, then the dean has to approve it, then it goes through various and * university committees, so there's a set of people who have to pass on it. Actually I've had a lot of fun this year because I've been we, in our department we have a chair and then we have vice chairs in charge of different things and I've gotten to be vice chair in charge of academic affairs, which means that I help Jeanne out with writing the letters for different people and it's been really neat for me to see how many ways people have of approaching their careers. So when some people sort of look towards getting leadership in terms of publishing a gazillion things and getting patents and some people sort of are very active at ACM and some people are active at IEEE and some people are active in other kinds of committees, so I think there's lots of ways to do this.

As was said before, a full professor's file is similar to a tenure file but it should have more of everything, and I think the really key difference between full professor and associate professor is you really need kind of a demonstration of leadership. So you really need to show that in your community that you have taken the leadership role, that your research program is mature, you can get funding, you can have students, you're doing service in terms of the fact that people know you and they think of you as one of the players in your community, etc. And I think often times people also expect that leadership in the department or at the university level, so people at the university should know who you are. You should have been taking at least chair roles for different committees in your department, etc. At least that's the way we look at it at UCSD. So leadership is really the key thing.

Well, as Barbara and I think Susan also said before, when you're a full professor it's very interesting because you are there. So now at least in terms of the academic course of things, you have reached kind of the highest kind of level you can. Now of course full professor at UCSD has lots of other sublevels, so there's full professor 1 and 2 and 3 but there's nothing beyond the full professor series. So in some sense you don't have to jump through any more hoops unless you want to. You can decide that now it's your time in life to learn how to surf or something like that. The problem is that by the time most of us are full professor, we've been completely brainwashed. We're just working hard. Why are we working hard? I don't know. It's there to work hard. Here you are, you've had this increased leadership. When I was an assistant professor I'd have a couple of graduate students. I have a group of 10 people now. Why do I have a group of 10 people? I don't know. It's interesting and really fascinating, I love my work. So you really have increased leadership and service in the department. You have more responsibility. You definitely have more work, at least that's my experience. But you also have more opportunities for impact and funding. So at the full professor level, you really have possibilities for I think influencing things beyond your own little group. So now you can really have some impact on where your field in general is going. I think that's a very exciting and heady and scary in some sense proposition.

So I actually wanted to talk a little bit about what happens beyond full professor, because we're not dead yet. O.K. So it turns out that beyond full professor it can really be a stepping stone. There's lots of things you can do. You can be department chair. You can be involved in university administration. You can go to the funding agencies and do some very, very interesting things. * is gonna talk to us tomorrow but that's sort of one option that she's doing right now. You can be the leader of an institute like Susan is. You can go into industry a lot of times at the full professor ranks. Now it turns out that making changes from industry and academia is not so easy to do. At the junior level it seems to be a little easier and at the very senior level it also seems to be a little easier and in the middle it's kind of hard. So here's a time when you might also think about is there room for you in industry. I think that in some sense you can think about what you do at full professor at the associate and assistant professor level, if you think of yourself as mentoring small groups of people. But in a sense, at the full professor level you can mentor whole disciplines, right, you can mentor much larger groups of people. You can be a department chair and see a department evolve in ways you'd like it to evolve. Or you can see your program at NSF evolve in a particular way or something like that. In a sense, you have really this opportunity for making more impact. My own experience is that achieving full professor is a good time for reflection, too. If you think about it, it's a good time to think about what are your career goals? Have they changed since you decided to go into academia? Are you interested in ramping up in some way, in downsizing in some way, in doing something different? What are your options? Which brings us to the glass ceiling. My experience is that a lot of people I've talked to and I don't know if I feel that there's been a glass ceiling or not myself, I have to think about that a little more carefully, but I think that women often do find a glass ceiling at the full professor ranks and I think they find that they kind of bump up into something. I'm program chair this year for a conference which I'll tell you, the IPPS conference and we were talking about this at the last conference, so this will be for IPPS 2000 and we were talking about it at the last one and I was shocked to see that there were no women on the steering committee. These are people, the people on the steering committee and the advisory committee were all men and it shocked me and I mentioned it to them and I was also shocked to hear that it was brought up at a steering committee meeting and people couldn't figure out why this was a big deal. So if you're in my area, now you're gonna go and get these guys in trouble. But it just shocked me because at least in parallel processing, there are plenty of really prominent women, certainly prominent enough to be on the steering committee or the advisory committee. So maybe there is a glass ceiling, I'm not sure.

My experience is that you look at the MIT report and you look at people sort of bumping up into possibly a glass ceiling and my own thoughts I wonder, how much of this has to do with gender and how much of this has to do with the fact that the most active researchers, the highest ranking researchers, at least in fields that I know about, are really on the fast track? The very highest researchers as we all do have really extremely demanding schedules. I know people who don't just travel once a month or twice a month, who travel several times a week. And I know people who are everywhere and I think that's, it's like what Barbara said about being in your face, I think that very, very prominent, the highest ranking people are where the action is. Everywhere the action is. They're at NSF, they're at all the meetings, they're in Europe, they're in South America, they're doing everything. I think the idea is a lot of people kind of look at that and you think where does this fit into my own scheme of things? Is this what I want to be doing? Is this not what I want to be doing? I think it's a really personal choice. I think that there are considerable rewards. I think if you're Ken Kennedy, everybody knows who you are, whether they're in parallel processing or not. But there are things Ken gives up as well for that kind of recognition. So I think it's a personal questions. So I thought I would leave you my last line, and hopefully we'll have plenty of time for questions, is some food for thought. It's something that I'm asking myself that you can ask yourself too. We'll be partners. It's your career. What do you want to do with it? I think at the full professor level you have a perfect right to sit back and say what am I trying to do professionally? Am I trying to push back the frontiers of science? Am I trying to really make an impact? Am I trying to be immortal in my career? Am I trying to mentor a billion students? What do I really want to do? What do I want my steady state life to be like? Ostensibly you're not ramping up anymore, you're there. This is your steady state life. If it's not something that's pleasing you, that's something you ought to be thinking about. How do your professional and personal goals fit together? You know, my daughter's 13 now and my son's 10 and a half and one would think with a 13 year old daughter, she could kind of be out on her own, I guess to shoot people or something, I don't know, I hope not. But I find that she actually needs at least as much attention as she did when she was little in a really different way. So what is that impact on the 10 people in my group at work and all the commitments I have? How am I gonna juggle all that? It's something I think about all the time. Is this what I want my life to be like? I think that's a question that everybody has to answer for themselves but I think full professor is a really good time to be asking those questions. I'm gonna throw this out to questions and we're gonna repeat your questions in hopes that this tape will pick up your very good questions and our answers.

So the question is, it sounds like we're all saying that you need to play it safe for the next six years from associate to full. Is that really true?

A: I'm not quite sure what you take as playing it safe. Do you mean by expressing your opinion and being yourself, doing your own thing, what? Many of us have changed research directions. The only thing we did say is if you do that, just take the consequence that it may take you one or two more years to establish yourself in that field. I also think that expressing your opinion, if you don't express your opinion, if you seem to be a wallflower, that's bad. You need to express yourself but do it in a way that is not making the other person lose face. There's ways of expressing your opinion that can make the other person look bad and feel bad, and then there's ways of expressing your opinion where you get respected for being independent. Just do it in a way to preserve the other person's dignity. Well, not everybody does.

?: So Nancy, I'm not sure people are saying play it safe as much as I think people are trying to bring out the effect of politics. I think that as you become more senior, politics plays a bigger role in how successful you are. So this is the great disappointment of my adult life, I have to tell you this. I really hate that but I think it's really true. I think that most, I think there are people who are not good at research and there are people who are just so stellar at research it doesn't matter, but the great majority of us are good at research and we're more or less successful because of random opportunities and politics and sort of indefinable things like that. I think that the more senior you get, the more it's sort of a group of people who have known each other forever and were graduate students together and have kind of come up through the ranks with each other and the political complexities of where you are start becoming more important then they were before. When other people that you didn't know were making decisions. I think this is kind of discouraging and I think it's the way it is and I don't think academia is unique in this respect. Sorry if I'm sounding cynical.

?: I just want to add that in terms of changing research direction. It's a question of scale. You switch within theoretical computer science from one aspect to another or within software engineering from one aspect to another, that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about maybe somebody who does compilers and then decides that there's something very, very interesting in information retrieval technology they want to do, where they may be absolutely no commonality with the groups of people who would be familiar with the work. So the real danger is not being able to establish yourself quickly enough to perhaps keep to your original timetable, but as Susan pointed out, there's no rule that you have to go after four years or five years or six years. I would say you definitely should do research in some area that you really like and that gives you some personal satisfaction. If you start becoming disinterested in what you've been doing for a while, then you should switch. But you have to accept the practical consequences of what might happen, that's all.

So the question is about switching post-tenure and how that impacts being a full professor. I don't think it has as much effect in terms of the timetable as switching during your tenure period. If you're well known in the profession, you'll be well known where you're going as well. That's the kind of thing that before I switched, I would have a serious conversation with the chair as to what they would suggest or what they would anticipate would be your plan, so that it's clear that you and the chair agree on some possible plan of action, if that's a consideration.

?: So here's the interesting thing about switching. You come into an institution at a certain level and to get to the next level there is some institutional memory, so it takes a long time. If you come at an assistant professor and you're eventually a full professor, of course, people have probably died off by then so it's O.K., but the idea is that it really takes the senior faculty a long time to think of you as a big guy. And if you actually change institutions, you get known at the level that you come in. If you've gone, especially from associate to full, say from assistant to associate, when you come into some new institution as associate, you're probably gonna get in a sense slightly more credibility, just because you've come in as a bigger fish rather than a little fish.

?: There's always the danger of the prophet is without honor in his own country. The problem with staying at one institution for too long is that you get buttonholed and I spent a lot of energy changing those perceptions.

?: There's always the ability to show that you are worth something in the rest of the world's eyes. That's always a tremendous lever that you can use to notch yourself up.

?: You shouldn't change just to advance either. In the institution I was at before I was at UCSD which was Purdue, I liked it a lot and in fact would have been happy to say except we had a two body problem so other things prevailed but I really liked the department and I certainly never would have left because I came here as an assistant professor.

?: So sometimes when people jump it's because it may not be that there is as many people involved. Certainly, for most of us, at least for those of us who have two body problems, getting two bodies in the same city at jobs that you think are O.K. is a very hard thing to do. So it's less easy to actually just jump to another place just because there's some other school interested in one or the other.

So the question is going through the pipeline so the associate professors sort of go in some order and then if the people in front of you are a little bit slower, it sounds like Taming of the Shrew, almost, the people in front of you are going a little bit slower, what do you do?

?: I'll just repeat what I said. When I was in this situation, I couldn't, unlike UC San Diego, there wasn't any real set of steps available to me as an associate to know when you're supposed to go for full and there were people senior in, that is, who had been associate professors longer than me when I chose to try to go up and in my institution, the professor can institute, ask the department to consider them for promotion but only after being six years in rank and I was only five years in rank. So basically to try to assess what my situation was, I took my * to more senior people, people who were already full professors in the department, with whom I felt comfortable talking, and I asked them to assess it and to try to show me what I had to work on in order to go up for promotion and after two or three of these people said there was really nothing more I should be doing, I kind of got the picture that I should go to my chair and ask, is this the time? And while I was told in my department that this hadn't been done before, a whole year early, there was no problem, O.K.? And I don't think if you worry a bit, some of us are insensitive about engendering resentment among the people that we hip hop over but the reality is a department at a university is a very small family of people who know one another, and they know when some people have more accomplishments than they do and if you don't run around crowing about it, look at me, look at me, I did this, no seriously, it's sort of like a sibling relationship, you can keep a respectful relationship with your colleagues and just get what you deserve. The thing to keep in mind is that's what you're asking for, what you deserve, not more, not less. Unfortunately sometimes it's up to you to try to go to the senior people and seek the advice but when you get the advice that you're ready, then go for it.

?: And I think we've also seen this recently at Penn, somebody on fast track, other people that have been not quite on such a fast track. This person has been doing exactly what Barbara has been describing and it took a little discussion among the senior faculty to understand that people should be promoted when they should be promoted. I think this is understood. Yes, it will cause a little bit of ruffled feathers but I have teenagers, you can deal with this.

?: So for us it really has more to do with each individual's progress through the track, although we have some sense about people who've kind of arrived together. It's possible for people to skip a step and they do that based on the merits of their own particular career. So I don't think we have the case that somebody who's sort of at the same place isn't progressing and that impacts other people, so that doesn't happen where we are so I'm not sure how to respond.

?: I also think it's very helpful for there to be more ambitious people sort of prodding the rest of us along. It might be a very good thing to shake your department up a bit.

?: On that same note, I think it's important once you get promoted or once you become a full professor that you try to be more open to talk to your associate professor colleagues about the process. I learned a whole lot about promotion to tenure and promotion to full from colleagues who made it before me and there are some of these unwritten kinds of ways of doing things, procedures, that if you're clued into them you can really figure out what you're supposed to be doing a lot better or what people expect you to be doing, the kinds of things they expect. And you may not be doing them just out of ignorance rather than anything else.

?: So the other thing that occurs to me is you still need mentors in some sense and mentors at the full professor level are not necessarily people who may be way beyond you in terms of career level but I think you still need people to talk to about things that are important to you and I have wonderful mentors at UCSD. I talk a lot to Jeanne Ferrante and I talk a lot to Larry Carter and these guys are wonderful and I really the feedback I get from them and hope that when they ask me for feedback I give them good feedback too. I think that's really important is that you need people to talk to and in your department it may be that some people who are at your level or are senior to you may be really good people to talk about how to address these issues, 'cause every department is really different.

So the question is about how to do it with children and delays that might happen because you're involved with your family and just feedback from the panel.

?: My kids are 23 and 25 now. I guess the way I handled it, it wasn't by plan, was to be in school while I had the kids, I mean to be in school and then working while I had the kids. When I was at Bell Labs I switched to part time, three days a week, and it was difficult to be, I was part of a group of young women who were all having children at the same time and wanted to stay working and the laboratories in the early and the mid-70s didn't know what to do with us because women had already dropped out for 10 years and we were saying give us six months leave and then we'll come back. I think you have to anticipate the fact that your physical age when you attain certain career goals will be different but I think in the long run if you are serious about your career and you carry out what you're doing, I don't feel people look at me and say, well, you're 15 years older than you should have been, you're 10 years older than you should have been because you messed around at Bell Labs and did this degree or whatever. I'm serious, there's not a straight-line answer to this and I think you have to be aware of it. You may attain these goals at a later age but I think very strongly you have to figure out what you want your life to be and if you want to spend time with your children, then that's what right for you. You will make it up, you're a smart person. You'll work damn hard when you're in school and you have good daycare and you'll just get to various points at a later physical age but you'll achieve the same things and you'll feel better about it.

?: I'd like to add a little different perspective to that. My kids are now 17 tomorrow and 13. My perspective is influenced by my sister, who I talked about earlier, who had a Ph.D. in biochemistry, had two, three children while she was doing her Ph.D. in four years and then dropped out entirely for seven years. She could not get back into biochemistry after that. You cannot drop out of your field and it's not so easy to get back in. I believe she could have gotten back in but at the point where she went back she discovered that biochemistry had radically changed in those seven years. It's a very fast-moving subject. Many of the techniques and procedures that she'd been taught as a graduate student no longer held. She was outdated, she was tired and it was hard. So she went back and did a masters degree in social work. I think that's what in her heart she had always wanted to do but if you want to continue in your field I really think the best advice and I think Barbara was saying this is you have to keep your foot in it. You have to somehow, even if you're slowing down and just doing it part time, you're there, you're talking to people, you're keeping abreast of the results. It's very difficult to drop out completely, although that may be what you want to, initially, feel like you want to do. Going part time is a very good option. Personally I've never really felt that people have looked down on me because I've taken a little longer. I took an extra year before I came up for tenure. I was trying to get another year but they didn't want to give me that. I took longer than these two did to get promoted to full professor. It wasn't an issue for me because I had accepted the fact that I was gonna spend that time with my children and it was gonna be slower. I have never sensed from my colleagues or from my community that I have been looked down on for that.

?: So I think there are two issues here. The issue is how you're perceived inside your department and how you're perceived in your community at large. Inside your department, you have to realize that women aren't the only ones who have children. There are men who have children in departments too and why is it a special challenge for us? It's a special challenge because I think that we worry about being perceived as mothers. If you turn it around and you think about your colleagues with children, you're very involved male colleagues, with children, they're not really perceived as fathers. In some sense, even though they think of themselves very strongly that way, in some sense my own feeling is that inside the department I've always strived to be, at least during the initial part when people are making their opinions of me, I've strived to be perceived as a technical person first and then have my personal life sort of be second and at this point in the department everybody just knows everything 'cause I've been there forever. There is a credibility issue inside the department. If you're careful to be credible inside your department by the time you're associate professor, I think the time you take is the time you take. In terms of outside your department, I think there are things you need to do in order to be full professor. You need to participate in service activities in your research community, etc. I think you can pick and choose. It's not just children. Life happens. Many of us are at an age where our parents are aging. Many of us are at an age where ourselves or other people have had serious diseases. Things happen that slow down other people's careers. They don't just happen to women, they happen to men, too, and in some sense it's interesting for me to look at my colleagues and at my colleagues to whom very terrible things have happened to and see how they've handled it and one thing they handle is they sort of keep the work thing the work thing and they do as much as they're gonna do, and they keep the personal thing as a personal thing and in some sense there's no rule of thumb but it's an interesting perspective to have. I have to say that having children is certainly the most important thing in my life but as you personally know, I'm really challenged by that. It's really hard to spend as much time as you want with your kids and spend as much time as you want with your career and it's sort of a wealth of riches and you just don't have time to make all of those things the experience you want them to be. I find that really challenging and have no good advice for any of you on this.

?: I just wanted to add one thing. I think this is sort of the blessing and the curse of the academic life, some of the issues that we've been talking about go right to this question. Being an academic means you have a whole myriad of things you're allowed to do and say it's part of your job. It also means that you're usually somewhat of an overachiever and therefore want to do all these things well. One of the curses of the academic life is to try to figure out how to pick the things you're going to do and do them well and among them, one of the things is how are you gonna be an academic and be a person at the same time. Different people have different internalizations of what that means. I think children and family and spouses and partners are all part of this and to me, it's the best part of an academic life, is that you can constantly sort of shift emphases as you go through life but it's also the.....

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