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.

Parallel Sessions _ I
Industry / Nat_l Lab Group
Industry / Nat_l Lab Career Options
4/30 1:30 - 3:00


Margaret Wright: This is the second panel in the Industry and National Lab Sequence. I am Margaret Wright, the moderator. The two other panelists are Lori Freitag from Argonne and Karin Petersen from Xerox PARC. We decided to go in alphabetical order, so Laurie is going to start. Let me tell you a little bit about each of them before we begin, though. We_re going to try to make a few minutes of remarks each. This is the format. Then we_re going to go into the open discussion that we had before and we_re prepared to stir things up a lot if you_re not lively enough, so you_d better be lively.

Lori is a research scientist in the math and computer science division at Argonne National Lab. She got her Ph.D. in 1992 from the University of Virginia. She_s been at Argon ever since. Her research interest at the moment are interactive visualization environments, computational steering and solving large scale applications with adaptive techniques.

Karin is the deputy lab director of the computer science laboratory at Xerox PARC. She came to Xerox after she completed her Ph.D. at Princeton in 1993, and her research interests are operating systems, distributed systems and user interfaces.

I_ll tell you about me when we get to me.

Lori Freitag: I just wanted to spend a few minutes rearranging the furniture. First, I_ll just go into just a little bit more just about who I am and where I came from so that you have a context when you ask questions and that sort of thing later. I actually started out in a very small liberal arts institution, which isn_t necessarily the most common path for going into graduate school and then into a research career. It turned out that was the path I chose because my father taught at the institution and for tuition waiver type reasons that was the option that was available to me. Then I went on to the University of Virginia where I focused on scientific computing as part of my thesis. Then I got a post doctoral appointment in the math / computer science division at Argonne, and at that time, actually, there were very few such appointments that were being made. I think it was maybe the third or forth post doc in *** at the time. Now since then, that has really just exploded, so there are a lot of opportunities for post docs there now. Then I sort of followed the traditional path, and I_ll talk about this a little bit more in a bit, but at Argonne *** we don_t traditionally hire people directly into the scientist track. We hire them as post ops first, kind of get a feel for what they do and who they are and how they work. Then they move into the assistant scientists, and then into the scientists track. A couple of other things I wanted to say, I_m going to try and speak generally, but of course, most of my experience has been at Argonne, so I_m most familiar with that system. I did spend a summer sabbatical at *** National Laboratories, so I can address some comments about how the DP side of DOE works. And I have done some teaching on the side for fun because I like to do it. Because not everybody here is necessarily familiar with a national lab environment, I know I certainly wasn_t when I started, I thought I would talk a little about the generalities of the lab environment. I know that was done a little bit earlier today. In particular for DOE we have sort of this grand global mission and that is to basically go ahead and try to come up with alternative energy sources, to make sure things are happening cleanly, to do some research in nuclear physics. DOE has 26 national laboratories associated with it, under it_s control. *** several different stove-pipe type applications. The two main branches, that I_m most familiar with again, are the energy research labs and those include Argonne, Berkeley, Oakridge, and they tend to focus a lot on basic science type research, chemistry, biology, lots of different fields. Then there is also the DP, or the Defense Program stove-pipe and this includes a lot of the classified work that is done for weapons, and those are places like *** National Lab, Los Alamos, and Lawrence Livermore. One of the things that controls the research options that are available to you in the National Lab is where the funding sources are coming from. DOE has lots of different funding sources, and in particular for Argonne, again this is where I can speak from the most experience, our funding comes from a lot of different places. Thirty-four percent, about a third of it comes from the energy research program at DOE. Also, we have some funding from nuclear energy and the environmental management branches of DOE. Then we also have this category called work for others. Those are usually our industrial collaborations, where industry actually pays for some of the research that happens at the DOE labs. We have about 16% of our global funding from that. Just sort of in general, when you think about the DOE labs, or the national labs, you want to find out what is driving their research environment, and I would categorize those into three major things. One would be, what is the lab management? You may not be aware of this, but actually the DOE labs are not managed directly by DOE. They hire contractors who manage the labs. Argonne is actually managed by the University of Chicago. We tend to have a very academic style environment. Now when I was at *San Dia, turns out they_re managed by a company, a subsidiary or something, of *Lockheed Martin, and their environment and culture is very different, I found. I don_t know if that completely stems from the management, but I know that was part of it. They were much more regimented in terms of they got to work at 7:30 and they left at 5. Where at Argonne, we kind of wander in at 9 or so and we stay until 6, maybe 7, so it was a much different culture. Then there_s the lab mission. At Argonne, again, we_re a multi-program lab. We have a mission that is primarily unclassified research. The DP labs, *San Dia in particular, has a lot of classified work that they do. That drives the style of research in a different *** options that are available there. And finally, as I just mentioned the funding has a lot to do with the options that are available to you. The only thing that I_d really like to pick up here on this slide is just Argonne has about 4,500 employees, of those, about 1,700 _ 1,800 of them are scientists and engineers and what I would consider a research type or style track. Of those, 800 hold Ph.D.'s, and these Ph.D.s come from a wide varieties of areas. Some particular, Argonne has strong emphasis in chemistry, chemical technology, biology, high energy physics, and of course, math and computer science is one of the new and growing fields there. In terms of career options for Ph.D.s, I know the most about Argonne and I_ll speak a little about the experience at *San Dia and what I saw there. At Argonne, we actually have a tenure track system for Ph.D. scientists. Again, most of the scientists at *MCS are hired as post docs first, as fresh Ph.D.s, they do that for a couple of years, and that is actually a good thing for them because they really get to focus on the research and building up their area of work and what they would like to do. Then if there is an opportunity, i.e. there is funding, they might decide to apply for an assistant scientist position. Now, in that position, it is actually very similar to an assistant professor_s position, and part of that at Argonne is because we are managed by a university and we have a lot of the same reward structure that the university does. So, we are rewarded for papers. We are rewarded for going to conferences, for external recognition, for serving on committees, and that_s all a part of our job description. As an assistant scientist, you further develop your field of work, what you would like to do, you start to gain some national recognition, that is very important actually, and after five years, if you_ve done your job, you go through the tenure process, and this is exactly what I_m doing this month, where you are evaluated by a lab-wide committee for your work, and you actually don_t get to say a word, you just submit the case and you have to have others speak for you. This gets to the point of having your management be aware of what you do so they can speak positively about you. Now, if you get through this, you become a scientist, and this is very similar to being an associate professor at a university, and during this phase of the Ph.D. career track at Argonne, you need to start writing a lot more proposals, start taking a lot more technical lead on projects, so develop a group, develop and area of research. At this stage you are to be going to enough conferences and travelling internationally that you become internationally renowned in your area of work and become a leader in the field. At that point you may or may not be evaluated for a senior scientist position. Now that is the same as a full professor. At Argonne you never have to become a senior scientist, but you can. That means that you are internationally recognized and you are the best in your field. At *San Dia, again this is the only other place I can speak of with some experience, they have a slightly different track as I understand it. Ph.D.s come in and they typically may have a two year evaluation period at which time they become staff and are _tenured_, but their evaluation system is a little different than Argonne_s in terms of everyone that I_ve talked to at *San Dia, they are very focused on how they have made an impact to other projects happening within the laboratory, so they aren_t as focused as we are on the external recognition. They really need to get involved with application areas within the laboratory and make contributions to those applications and can demonstrate impact there. Now we heard Mary earlier saying that at Los Alamos in the Computer Science division, they are actually much more externally recognized there as well. So, there are lots of different paths there. Some of the other options you may have, if you don_t want to go through the route of scientist, you can do a couple of different things. If you have a Master_s degree or a Ph.D. you can go through the scientific engineering track, or scientific programmer track, we actually have a new slate of positions called scientific programmers into which we hire both Master_s and Ph.D.s. Now, these folks typically in the past have been primarily Master_s students, and they work as part of a project or a group. They are typically under the direction of a staff scientist so they don_t have as much responsibility in terms of deciding this is the direction of the project, they can say this is what I_m going to do today particularly, but they don_t have the more global responsibilities of projects. They do participate in writing papers and proposals, so if research is not something you_re necessarily sure you want to do but you want to try it out, this could be one avenue for doing that once you have your master_s degree. They are not subject to the tenure track system that I just described at Argonne at any rate. They are typically actually soft money positions, what I mean by that they are funded by external grants that are not part of our core funding, which means potentially the funding could go away. They are typically associated with particular projects as I mentioned. Let me just make a comment about the *San Dia experience that I had for folks with Master_s and Bachelor_s. Now there I found that a lot of people that had Master_s degrees were doing very well in terms of, they were actually in charge of a project, they were project leads, so for instance, I worked with the *cubic group, which is a mixed generation group there, and the project leader had only a Master_s degree and he_s in charge of several Ph.D.s. So, you can go through this management track at the various different labs. I haven_t seen that happen at Argonne yet, but we have been traditionally until just the last couple of years, primarily just Ph.D. scientists working in one or two people groups, and that has since changed. We are now much bigger and we have projects with project leaders, but those are still primarily Ph.D. level folks.

If you were interested in these sorts of career options, how would you go about getting started? I can just tell you some of the things I look for when I_m hiring. I think this is true for, I_ve been on lots of hiring committees, we all look for the same sorts of things. When we_re hiring for scientific programmers or research engineers, we will almost always look for pertinent software experience because that will be one of your tasks. You will be writing software. We look for Master_s and Ph.D.s in Computer Science, Computational Science, or Applied Mathematics, sometimes an Engineering degree, although we typically focus on Computer Science and Applied Math. We also look for folks who have experience through internships. You_ve heard a lot about internships today, and Argonne also has a very strong program for under-graduate and graduate students. I again, highly encourage folks to apply for these things. They are really beneficial. Some notes and issues, though personally speaking, I would say that the Scientific Research career track can be very rewarding. I have found it to be very time consuming, but that_s partly a function of personality, so I find it hard to say no. And this is something that they say early on, you have to learn to say no, but I say, _okay, I_ll do whatever._ I ended up getting in a little over my head for a while, so I_ve learned to say no, but that does take experience I think to do that. We_ve heard this also earlier today, this is something I_m facing in the near future, and it_s the *two-body problem. We actually do have a lot of problems with that with our scientists in our division. A lot of them are married and they have wives with professional careers, wanting to be academic researches. People have lived apart and had to very much struggle with this problem. And that was all I was going to add unless somebody has a particular questions about what I_ve said, otherwise we_ll leave it for open discussion.

Karin Petersen: I_m going to take a slightly different *** from Lori, I_m going to mostly tell you what my career at PARC has looked like, and sort of the options that other people have taken, and that gives you a flavor of what you can do there. To set the context, my current title is Deputy Lab Manager for the Computer Science Lab. This is probably the first time ever at a presentation that I_m going to put a *** chart up, but that should give you some context of what my title means. Basically, but labels in there don_t matter much. Basically, the org chart at PARC is really flat. The Director and Center Manager, then we have a whole bunch of Lab Managers, but it varies at times, which normally between 5 and 8. Then a few people who manage operations and strategic management. Underneath one lab manager, and my current lab manager is Richard Bruce, you_ll have a number of area mangers which are very similar to *** description of department heads. And these people underneath have basically, what she called the happy normal people, and you normally have anywhere between 5 and 10 of those, so the groups are actually smaller than what Julia described. My role is actually duo. I am an area manager, so I have right now 5 people reporting to me. I had 8 before. But I_m also sort of Richard_s left hand, and that is my role as the deputy. A few things to be said in addition to this org chart with respect to Xerox, we only have one level between *** the Center Manger and our CEO, which means, even the normal happy people very close to our CEO, and that actually makes a difference because you get to meet him, and when he runs into me in the hall, he knows me, which is an interesting experience because you see a lot of the strategic side of the company at the same time.

Now, what I_m going to tell you is how did I get there. The time line sort of works like this. First, I_m one of them foreigners, so I actually finished college in Venezuela in 1988 and really didn_t know what to do. School was something that I did know how to do, so I decided to go to grad school. I ended up at Princeton, mostly because my father was in steel trading and he had to deal with Philadelphia and New York a lot, so Princeton was smack in the middle, and that was very convenient. This is in all seriousness. I had done some *** and some *** work as an under-grad but the program mattered much less than being close to my family at that point. And it really worked out well for me. Princeton is a small town, I felt really safe there. The department was small, I felt very safe there. I had ***, I had my advisor who was incredibly well connected, so he basically put me on the map, it just worked great. Did I plan it, no way. But my self-confidence was actually not that high when I graduated, so I looked at everything. I did industrial labs, I looked at advanced development, I looked at teaching colleges, I looked at universities, and funny enough, my ultimate decisions came to *** college, which is a teaching college, and then between *** PARC which were the research labs. I ended up at PARC. The decision between *** and *** PARC was that I actually ultimately felt that I could do a better service to kids at *** if I had more of a research network around me then if I went directly there. I didn_t have that network at the time. I feel that the biggest thing that you can do for students is to locate them at the right grad school, at the right jobs and that was not something I could do straight out of grad school. So I said okay, lets go to a research lab, particularly *** and PARC would give me great opportunities for that, and the decision was excruciating and there are people in this room who called me a lot in that process, but I think ultimately, I went to PARC because I felt there was a much larger diversity of things going on. And, I had been a summer student there, so I sort of knew the place. Actually, sort of, in the context of things that have happened recently, Mark *** was the real determinant of me going to the PARC. He had this charisma that just threw you in and he sold me. I have been at PARC ever since. I got promoted to area manager early 1998, I became the Deputy Lab Manager at the end of 1998.

Now I_m going to spend time sort of telling you how did I get to these two positions in those five and a half years that I_ve been there. I think the technical side actually matters quite a bit. The trajectory there was really when I got there, I joined a really large existing project, but I carved out my piece right early on. It wasn_t that I ended up doing something for somebody else, which goes to *** question. I went to the meetings, and again Mark encouraged me, _try to find something you want to do that is going to make a difference to the project._ I did that. At the same time I wanted to be sort of part of something where a lot of the ideas were just starting. So, I was basically working on both the *** and body project at the same time, which *** it worked out great, because *** was in the design phase, where the *** project was I had to code a lot. The next two projects I put up mostly because I think those are the kinds of examples where you get visibility from a management point of view. They wanted to see some things happen. They were commanding from above, look into distributed info-structure, what can you do different. In both cases I volunteered to look into it. I didn_t stop my other projects, but I did volunteer to look into it. At the end of 1997 we started a brand new project, and I was actually one of the co-founders of the project, so there is a real evolution there. With respect to the more managerial things, I arrived at PARC in 1993 and in 1994 they had a big off-site, *** allowed, and again Mark asked me, _Why don_t you do an evaluation of what people feel the biggest problems or the biggest issues with the lab are right now._ That_s what got the whole thing started for me. I ended up talking to almost everybody in the lab, writing up what it was all about, looking at the issues and presenting them. Out of that came something that I felt pretty passionate about, which was we heard way too little about the details of the project so I wanted longer presentations about the project, so I pushed that. I was sort of the leader of the ***. Well, that got me enough visibility that I was asked to lead a security workshop. Now, security, of all those projects that you saw, zippo. I had known nothing about security other than there are certificates, encryptography and stuff, but people had seen that I had the organizational skills to pull that through. Recruiting has been happening all the time. I_ve been really involved in that all across. In 1996 was sort of a PARC hyadis because I was the program chair for a pretty major conference, so I spent most of my organizational time on that. Then in 1997 and 1998 got really busy with CSL and PARC stuff. Early 1997, our *** Lab Manager, John White, asked us to look into what the new areas of research for CSL should be given what the rest PARC was doing, so we tried to get in a lot of people from the other *** labs to talk about the types of problems they were having. I co-led that effort. That led John *** Brown to lead a study group, co-lead. Most of these things are all like partners. Co-lead a study group, again not at all in my field of expertise, *** and smart matter. That went on for about 3 or 4 months. Then they asked me to help with the board of directors, the Xerox board of directors, *** which since that was successful, I ended up leading one fourth of the Xerox senior management meeting early in 1998, which was a very interesting experience. That was the 200 top managers at Xerox, came to PARC to look for what should we do next technology-wise. I coordinated the networking strategy segment. Then that gave me enough visibility at Xerox that they actually asked me to help with the strategic conference group that was Xerox wide, not just PARC wide. Did I plan any of this when I started here? No. I think it_s a lot of little steps like Barbara was saying. You can accomplish each of those. If someone had told me in 1993 that I had to pull this off I probably would have went out of the door and never come back. But at this point I was ready for it. It was nerve-wrecking, but it got done and it wasn_t that hard. I mean, let_s take responsibility if you have your CEO and President sitting in front of you, you know you can screw up, but it worked.

What do I do in my current position? As an area manager, I manage the budget for those people. I help them project plan, and particularly the *placeless project is in my area so I do project lead and management at the same time. I try to do as good of a job with people management that it gets them to look at what their careers want to be. Get them visibility in the *** community. Get them on program committees and do that kind of work. But I also have things like a person with very low performance in the group which, yes it wrenches your stomach, but you have to handle those because people complain about the low performers, so you have to manage that. On the more lab-wise aspect, it_s more strategic in the sense that you try to position the project in the lab and within Xerox, you do a lot of communication. I have spent more time doing Power Point slides over the last years than probably I ever cared for. And we_re starting to do market positioning in the lab. So we_re looking up what start-ups are doing because there has been this recognition that the garage is doing a lot of what lab test on funding, and we should not tell Xerox that there is this big new opportunity if the start up is doing it already.

In this part, I_m not really doing much except for leading the project. That_s the good, bad and the ugly. The good is you get to do a lot of neat things for people strategically. The bad is you have much less time for technical work. The ugly is that you are in the middle. You_re managing people, they have request fund needs, your boss has request fund needs, they both push against each other, you_re smack in the middle. *** and when I told them to go away and grow up and come back ***.

I_m almost out of time. Let me skip this slide and say there are many other different career paths that people at PARC have taken. Some transition into the company. They basically join business divisions. The most recent one of those, Steve Cousins graduated about two and a half years ago from Stanford and he has become the area manager of an advanced development group which is no co-located at PARC, but is really responsible for moving technology into the business division. Start-ups. We have two flavors. The ones that completely leave the company we call those spin-outs, or those that are actually Xerox funded. *** ended up doing that. *** took his stuff out. Mohan quit and later started a company that now has a big deal with AOL, so he probably took the best path. Some people go back to ***. Both *** and *** after about 3 or 4 years decided to go back to ***. Both of them have quite close ties with *** so if that_s a path you want to take, that_s something you have to make sure of. Some people go into government. Now we got Theresa after her government stint and she went to *** and spent four years as an upper program manager, and some women have quit and opened their own consulting businesses. One last slide, there is an interesting thing when you_re working in a corporation. The execs, the top level execs, the ***, the President, CEOs, they almost always have an executive assistant that is basically their left hand that travels with them everywhere. This is an opportunity that few people use to get to know the company. Somebody in the corporation did that. Dana went to work for Paul for two years. That_s a real springboard in the company. If you are interested at all in going into the executive side of this, that_s a move to make. They love women in those positions. And other people have gotten their MBA sort of on the side and have become more in the strategic management side of the center rather than the research side of the center. So that give you a flavor of all the different things that people have done. Now with respect to research itself, there are different levels. You_re a member of the research staff one, which means you have no Ph.D., member of the research staff two, you have the Ph.D., you_re a senior scientist, you have a Ph.D. and you_ve been there for a long time and have shown good results. Then at Xerox ***, which is extremely rare, those people have done super well.

Margaret Wright: I once gave a talk on how to give a talk, and one of my pieces of advice was always wear something with pockets because you_re going to get one of these microphones that goes in a pocket, and I forgot that rule today. Thank you Lori and Karin. I_m going to be different again, this is good that we_re all so different, I thought I would give you a formal career summary, there isn_t time to go into all this stuff, so I started out as an undergraduate Master_s then got a Master_s in computer science at Stanford. At that time for various reasons I was mainly tired of school. I decided to do scientific programming, so I did that for a while. Then I realized that I didn_t want to be in a position my life where other people decided what I was going to do. I wanted to decide my own things, so I went back to school and got a Ph.D. in Computer Sciences. Stanford had then had a soft money position in the operations research department. My area is optimization in scientific computing. I could talk a lot about soft money positions and the properties that they have, but I won_t do that here, I_d be glad to speak with any of you that have those positions. In 1988 I came to Bell Labs and I started off as a member of technical staff. Julia mentioned earlier today that it_s a very flat structure. Basically you_re a member of technical staff or you_re a department head. I became a department head two years ago and I_ll comment on that a little bit. We do not have a technical track. I_ll just make a comment that I think the disadvantage in my personal opinion outweigh the advantages because I think people who care about am I more important than this other person, look to that kind of thing to kind of work out their problems. If everybody has the same rank, Ken Thompson who just got the national medal of technology is a member of technical staff at Bell Labs. He_s the same rank that everybody noted the _nice normal people_. I personally prefer that ***.


So what is Bell Labs research? When you_ve heard this actually from several *** today, there is Bell Labs, which is a very big organization, it has 25,000 or 26,000 people. There_s a subset of Bell Labs which is called Bell Labs Research, and that is where I work. It was part of AT&T, in fact we were told always to say AT&T Bell Laboratories when we gave any talks until 1995 when we split up. Now we kept the name Bell Labs. When they divided up the *** property, they said AT&T gets to keep AT&T and you get to keep Bell Labs because people still don_t know what it is, and they don_t think that we exist, but we do, at least we did yesterday. There are about 1,100 researchers, and by that I mainly mean people with Ph.D.s. Ken Thompson does not actually have a Ph.D. by the way. But most people have Ph.D.s, and their researchers mainly were located in New Jersey. If you want to see about what Bell Labs is like, there_s a URL. I should mention, because we heard a lot of talk about Silicon Valley, that a new Silicon Valley location called Bell Labs Research Silicon Valley has just been opened in June. Sadly enough my director is leaving to become the head of that. They have their own website, they_re mainly interested in networking and internet software, but they are going to be hiring in a big way very soon. So that_s something I think I should mention. The big growth area for Bell Labs these days is Computer Science, so it_s perfect for everyone in this room. We cannot enough good people to fill all the slots that we have. Every year they are always after us, hire more computer science Ph.D.s. We have trouble finding them. This is definitely a growth area, develop research.

This panel is supposed to be about career options and the one I_m mainly going to talk about is being a researcher at Bell Labs, but I will talk a little about management. It_s hard to describe it if you_re not there, so there has been talk about summer programs. We have a summer program, people can get jobs, you can come by and see what it_s like. It_s hard to describe it without being there. But let me make a few comments. First of all we do a wide spectrum of research. We have physicists as Bell Labs, we have chemists and biologists and engineers, and most varieties at Bell Labs Research in Murray Hills. In Computer Science there_s a wide spectrum of research from most theoretical to operating systems, you know Unix *** started there and things like that. There_s a very wide spectrum of areas of research and it ranges from absolutely the most fundamentally basic research you could imagine. I_ll talk a little in a second about your reward, but you_re supposed to be of academic quality. The rule of thumb is supposed to be that every person there could get a job in a good computer science department. You have to write papers, your prove theorems and all this kind of things. Then there_s a big spectrum over the applications. Not what I do, which is optimization as an illustration of this, I develop algorithms and I prove theorems about them and I get some theoretical results and them I implement them and try them out and then I also use them on real problems. I think a key feature of people at Bell Labs, and I think this is true at other industry research labs, you wouldn_t tend to go there if you didn_t want your research to make a difference to something real. You_re there because you_re interested in a good source of problems, or something interesting to work on. So you can have theoretical computer science, you have networks to work on, or something like that. I have lots of large optimization problems. I put *** and collaboration a great joy. I was commenting at lunch that when I talk to people at Bell Labs before I went there they would say the best thing about the place is that there are all these really smart people around and they are working on different areas and they_ll talk to you. I thought that_s always nice. Stanford wasn_t like that by the way. Now that I_ve been there, and I don_t know how to describe this, and I think that all of the Bell Labs people in this room would agree, everybody is sitting there, they_re really smart, except me, they have their doors open and if you want to walk in and say _I have this idea,_ or _would you talk to me about this,_ or _what do you know about this._ They will talk to you, and it_s so wonderful. It_s indescribably wonderful to be able to do that. To just talk to people. I think if it were abused it would dry up, but it doesn_t happen. People have their doors open and they talk to you. This is something in terms of a research environment that I think is really special about industrial research labs. I believe this is true across the board. And the collegiality I want to just mention something about it. There_s really not much of _this is my idea and I don_t want to tell you about it._ I think because in ***, now this is probably unfair to ***, but that_s okay. They have a lot of good things. But I have been told that if you write a paper with and authors, each of you gets less than *** in credit. In fact, you often get zero credit, so you list your papers and they say these are all co-authors, so what have you done? What I was told when I came to the lab, I believe it_s true, that for a co-authored paper, you get 75% credit regardless of how *** is. Because they really want you to work together, so it_s very nice that you can feel free to talk to people and say _hey, let_s write a paper about that._ It_s very exhilarating.

Okay now, I put rewards because it_s actually not just the rewards that the company gives you, and we talked earlier today about salary and trips and things, but what are your personal rewards. First of all when you do research, you have that incredible satisfaction like nothing else in the world of doing a good job and doing something new and being excellent in every way. But you have at Bell Labs, and other industrial research labs is you feel you_re making a difference to the real world. Now if you_re in university, of course you make a difference to the real world, but it_s not quite in the same way. You work on real problems, you can say we_re doing this thing on the internet and I can *** a theorem, or I found a pattern today that shows what they were planning to do in the first place wouldn_t work, so you get this incredible satisfaction of knowing that something matters, that something that_s real is different is effected by what you did. So, keeping up on what Julia said, I didn_t put normal people, but it_s very interesting. Julia and I work at Bell Labs together and we had this group of consultants come in and they started talking about what people wanted and they said don_t you all want to be promoted. Most of the people just think no, actually what I really want to do is just do my research. I want to just be an MTS, that_s what I want to do forever until I retire. I don_t want to be promoted, I just want to be a fine scientist. That is a career option. That is what most people do. They do not get promoted because as I said, you_ll see in a second there aren_t so many management positions, they just stay researchers. That is a perfectly respectable career option and it_s what most people take assuming they stay at the lab.

What are other career options within Bell Labs? Again, as you heard, you can become a manager. Now, a department head, particularly in my area, there are 6 _ 10 people in a department. This is not management in the usual sense because people are individual researchers so you don_t lead the project. You don_t say right team we_re having a meeting and here_s our deadline. You don_t do anything like that. People just stroll away and do their own research. We have to worry about their merit review, you have to make sure they_re happy, I think I mentioned earlier that if they want something, you try to give it to them. Or is someone is not performing well, you try to think about how to help the person. But you don_t manage in the sense of what I think some of you might think of actually managing something. I think it_s quite important that if you_re interested in management to have in mind what you mean. Do you want to call the shots, or do you just want to be someone responsible for some people. *** there_s a management hierarchy, so there_s department heads, which is what I am, you can become a director from 6 _ 8 department heads. A director normally has 60 people. Then there_s executive director, and you see it goes from 16 directors to 3 executive directors. Now at Bell Labs right now there is one woman director *** she just get into the National Academy of Sciences this week. It_s a problem that there aren_t _enough women in management._ If you wanted to go into management, they would be eager to have you. I guess that_s the best way to put it. Some people decide after they have been at Bell Labs Research for a while that they really don_t want to do research. Maybe they want to turn something into a product, or maybe they want to go into business, they actually like *** with people and doing things. There are really easy ways to do that, but a development organization are eager to have people, and also people with research credentials are often highly valued. So if you go and decide you really want to leave and go into another part of the company, it_s very easy. *** start-ups, it_s probably similar to what Karin was saying. *** is now trying to be a little less like a big huge corporation and a bit more adept and as we_ve mentioned before *** Silicon Valley. So they are spinning off little start ups within the company, so if you wanted to do that, this is actually something that is pretty popular, you can get involved with something and then you can say _I_d like to go and work for this that or the other start up._ Or of course, you can just leave and go to a start up.

Our career options that don_t involve Bell Labs are the obvious ones that have been mentioned before. You can go to ***. It_s relatively easy to do that if you_ve met the standards of the place, because I said, remember, you have to be able to get a job at a good computer science department so this is a test, can you get a job in a good computer science department, and most people can if they want to. We actually have almost no turn over. Hardly anybody leaves, which I think we take as a sign that people like it there. Now, it_s difficult to resist the temptation to give typical general advice, and I_m not going to resist it so I apologize for that. One of the skills, this is going to be talked about later, and you don_t need to pay any attention this, this is just my view. But first of all you have to be great technically. That_s easy. I_m assuming that everyone in this room is just really excellent technically. But I think that_s the most important thing. Secondly you need to have good judgment. You need to have good scientific judgment and that_s not always easy, and you also have to have good judgment in people. And I say this because I think in any kind of environment, particularly in a lab when you have to rely on other people, you need to judge who is making it up, who is really offered him or herself and you can_t trust them. Who_s opinion you can rely on. And I think that is a skill you can acquire with some training. I don_t think we all intuitively know how to judge people well. Communication writing and speaking I think are absolutely essential. There was a question today about writing and speaking, and I think those are essential. If you haven_t done one of these workshops where you get someone to look into your topic and really grill you, watch a video tape of yourself and see how you_re coming across. If you_re a good speaker it can cover a lot of things. If you_re a good writer, it can_t cover a lot of experience, but it can convey how good your work is. It_s actually very sad if someone is really good technically and is unable to write clearly. Again I think this is something that CRE doesn_t offer, so let people help you learn to write better. I think this is really critical. I put openness / versatility. I think these are crucial in an industrial lab environment. We heard earlier today how an industrial national lab you can change what you do, people who come in as *topologist and left in experts in operating systems. They really can change their career and it_s not a problem. We don_t have a tenure thing where you have to be the same thing that you were before. We also heard earlier today about your thesis and how far it can carry you. Some people come in and they say I was kind of bored with that and I want to do something different and that_s fine. And as long as you_re, of course, being technically excellent, which may not be so easy, but it_s certainly possible. I put sense of humor because sometimes it all gets to you and this is really presumptuous of me to tell you you should have a sense of humor but sometimes you just need to look at it all and say okay, let_s have a good laugh about how crazy things are. I put perspective, and I mean this in the following way. Women are stereotypically regarded as hard on themselves and I think that_s true. They are much more critical, they are always saying I_m not good enough. I think this is a real issue, it_s true of many men too, but I think that it_s clear that women suffer from this problem. You shouldn_t get discouraged and let people convince you that your work isn_t any good. You really need to believe in yourself and make sure you have a correct perspective on your work. But I put and *bad. What I mean by that is it_s actually important for you to understand what your weaknesses are and the flaws that you have. Again, this is just _apple pie_ type advice. The way I think you should approach this, and I_ll get to it in a second, is you should have someone you trust that you can say _what do you really think of my work._ What do you really truly think of my work? Now this is a difficult thing because we have all had people say, _now I want you to really be critical of me,_ and you spend a lot of time and you say this is really bad and you give it to them and they say _what? What?_ and they are furious at you and maybe they never speak to you again. You quickly learned that they didn_t mean they wanted criticism, they wanted you to be enforcive. I think we all should think about having someone who will honestly say I don_t think this is good. I think you need to work on this. It_s very hard to do this, it isn_t easy at all, and you may say that it doesn_t exactly help with your confidence, but I think if you had enough confidence with yourself, you would actually want to know, and _ this is something that I said to many groups and I actually think it_s good that it was mentioned this morning. You encounter many people in your life, and some you say _That was really impressive and that was really good._ Others you think, _That was so awful and so boring, they are so terrible._ I think a really good strategy is to take the things that you like, this was all mentioned this morning, don_t try to copy them generically. With a guy at Stanford who is really a top person but he is an arrogant jerk, and unfortunately a lot of his graduate students picked up the arrogant jerk part *** in a world class lead, so they are all in kind of a lot of trouble. They failed to do it right. Don_t become an arrogant jerk please, there are enough of them already. If you see someone do something that you like, you should say _can I do that too?_ Or maybe, _can I adapt it to my own style?_ I_ve done this myself. The first time I was on a panel at something in Washington. There was a guy on it and he gave this really authoritative sounding statement but in fact it said nothing, and it was clear later he didn_t really know anything about the area. And I thought, _that_s really a good *field to have._ So I asked him later about it and he said, _you put these words ***._ Finally, I want to have time for questions, find a colleague that you trust, or maybe more than one colleague that you trust. Like Julia and I *** get together and really say, _how do you think things are going?_ And talk with someone who can give you good advice. *Karin and I were talking earlier about, if someone wants to promote you, they are not going to say, _By the way, this is really going to be a lot of work_, and they may not tell you the bad points. You need to go to a friend and say, _if I do this, what would be the consequences?_ And I think finding such a person that is not necessarily a mentor, it can be your peer, but someone who can do that for you is really good.

Okay, I_ll stop now and we_ll have some open questions. I_ve been instructed to say please talk into the microphone even if you are in the front row because otherwise we won_t have it on tape.

Audience question: My name is Annette Ladman* and I teach at James Madison University. For the past few years my work has been primarily teaching and curriculum development and it seems like the track to a job at the lab would be either a suppressed Ph.D. or some sort of an established research record. What can you say to somebody in my position, can I use the background experience I have right now to try to get a position of that sort?

Karin Petersen: I think at PARC you would have probably a hard time. I mean, we hire fresh Ph.D.s and then we hire senior people who have a really strong track record. Occasionally we get people who want to spend a sabbatical with us or three months with us, but normally those are people we know already too. Just teaching experience is probably going to be a hard time.

Lori Freitag: I_d say it_s the same at Argonne. We_re looking at a lot of fresh Ph.D.s. We have one position now for a middle scientist level person which we_re having trouble filling because we aren_t getting the right applications at that level. Again, we also have summer programs, but it_s typically for research and with people we know.

Margaret Wright: Well, I_m going to be a teeny bit more hopeful here. First of all I agree completely with what Barbara Simon said this morning which is it_s not always true that you can do what you want, but you can often find ways to do things. Two ways I would say this could be approached is if you were willing to work in a not very well paid environment, you can often persuade people to let you be around and show you_re useful and work with them and if you do really well they_ll notice you. The second thing is the National Science Foundation has programs where they will pay people to go back to school who have just been teaching for a while to get brought up to speed in research. There are not many of them, but they are especially eager to find women in Computer Science. I think that might be a way to do that, and then you would be sort of the moral equivalent of a fresh Ph.D. even though you already had one. I think there are two ways to do that that might work.

Audience Question: I just realized when you guys finished speaking that none of us, either this morning or in this panel really addressed the questions of performance review and how performance is reviewed. I sort of know how it is at AT&T and Bell Labs but I don_t know how it is in your places, and I_d be interested just for comparative purposes to find out.

Karin Petersen: At PARC is varies from lab to lab. As I said there are 5 to 6 labs, so let me tell you how it works for CSL. CSL has a peer review process. Every year in January, you write up what you did during the year before and you say who you collaborated with on each of the things you worked on. Your manager hands out those things for review by the people your listed and by his or her own judgment. The manager then collects both the original input plus the review and puts a case together, or basically puts this big document together. Then the management team meets for like two days basically and goes over every single one of those in detail. We have five buckets that we put people in. Basically from under performance to extraordinary performance. That basically defines the process. Then you get feedback to the people. In general we have been really bad about dealing with under performance. That we_re trying to change this year, which is of course a headache for an unseasoned manager like me. It_s really nice when you have good performance in your group. Normally the feedback is fairly simple. They get the whole document. One thing to know is that the reviews are with attribution, so people will know what other people said. Every once in a while that causes some friction, but ultimately it_s actually a good thing, because if there is some resented feeling in the background, it_s better for that to get out rather than accumulate for a long time. For most performance, they rate their PA, they discuss it with their manager, they make some plans or goals for the next year and that_s it. For the under performers this year we_re spending a lot of work trying to get them back to where they should be.

Audience Question: (inaudible)

Karin Petersen: That_s part of it. It_s also relative to the other people, which basically means if you have a lot of very good performers, some people look not very good. It means if 50% of the people can master an extremely good piece of work, then the other people have to live up to that expectation too. Now, it is not expected for people to work 80 hours a week. In fact, some people really do work 40 hours a week. But I think you get a real spectrum of effectiveness there. Some people are really good at using those 40 hours effectively. Some people need 60 hours to get the same amount of work. So it isn_t time, it_s really result.

Audience Question: My name is Anne *** and I_m at the University of Texas in Austin as a research associate there. Before that I was at *** the Austin Research, which by now has dwindled, or is non-existent. This is where my question to you, because I have a feeling that also it_s happening at other places too, that industrial research facilities are becoming less *** oriented and more bottom line oriented, meaning something that is good for the company, and I wanted you to each maybe elaborate a little bit on that from the various positions.

Karin Petersen: PARC has 5 different types of *flaps. Some of them have traditionally been very connected to the products, in the sense that they are much more aligned with the main business. The physical sciences are. They produce new types of toners and they produce new types of lasers that go into the printers and things like that. Now, the computer science lab has traditionally been completely outside of Xerox_s focus. I mean, there_s *** computing, what does Xerox have to do with that. There has been more focus on trying to relate why the work that we_re doing is important to them. In that sense the internet has done us the biggest favor in the planet, because they know now that they can_t just build boxes and put them in a room where people have to walk up to them and press a green button. Those big boxes have to be highly integrated with all the rest of the environment. And that is our expertise. Our expertise is distributed systems that work well for the end user. That_s the nag that PARC has had, is to try to focus the research on the effect of the end user. In some sense, that_s why I said I spend a lot of time communicating. We do spend a lot of time telling people why our projects are important to them, but are we doing advanced development, no. We do have a new group in the center that is doing advance development, so they_re trying to figure out how to move things from research to be important to them. That_s no doubt about it.

Lori Freitag: I_ll just say a few words because I_m not in an industrial lab, so it might be a little bit different than the question you_re asking. One thing I can say about the environment at Argonne, since I_ve been there, I_ve been there 10 years, and as I mentioned in my talk, I was one of the first post docs that they hired, and the people I worked for were hired in as staff scientists and they were a very small group of people, and they all had core funding from DOE, which meant that they really didn_t have anybody to answer to. They did their research in groups that were typically very small. Now since then, and this goes to the shifting research model paradigm, things have completely changed. Now, only one-third of our budget is from core funding, and the other two-thirds are from other sources, primarily research grants or soft money. We now have to answer for milestones that we_ve written in our proposals. We are not free to sort of just randomly change our direction. We_ve written a proposed project and we should try to adhere to that to some extent. But it_s not the same as having a product bottom line, but it is very changed.

Margaret Wright: Well, it_s only possible for me to answer this question about my own lab because it_s different. But my take on this, and now I_m speaking with my department head hat on, this is a research job and so to do research all the time, that_s your job. But the way to think of it, I believe, is if you_re the best person in the whole world in your field or one of the top people, and you_re doing just fine and what you do doesn_t have to have anything to do with anything in the company, you win the Nobel Prize, you get the National Medal of Technology, they like you. You win prizes you do well. If you are not in the league, which is the case for most people, they_re supposed to be there because they_re interested in making a difference to the company. So if you refuse and you say you_re going to work on this area and not talk to anybody and not do anything, and you_re research isn_t at that high level, then sooner or later, in a performance review, you might have a little chat where someone will say maybe you can collaborate with so and so, it really is gentle. It goes on for a long time. If you are mediocre at your research, and you aren_t really contributing anything to the organization, and you_re not really visible, then I think you start to be in trouble. But there_s no sort of bottom line connection. You_re ranked really on your technical excellence. Julia mentioned that at AT&T labs if you make a big contribution to something in the company, and this has happened, people have done things which aren_t really, they wouldn_t win any prizes of research, but they have made a huge difference for business and that does get rewarded. We_re funded, by the way, by a tax on the businesses. They support us whether they like it or not, so, but they occasionally say why are we paying you all this money and we_re not getting anything, but they are getting something, and as long as they keep getting something you_re okay. But what you_ve asked is something we all worry about. It can change every night.

***: Do you have different types of taxes on the business. We do. We have three different types.

Margaret Wright: No. It_s one percent of revenues, and that_s it.

Audience Question: Can I make a comment rather than ask a question about this topic? I think, people in our lab anyway, a lot of people come to the lab because they want to have an impact on the company. Our lab was actually started by people who left Xerox PARC many many years ago. Different PARC now than it was then, but one of the things that was the biggest complaint was that the company would not pay any attention to their work. This is the whole story about the people that developed the Alto and then *** *** went off and did the Macintosh and all their work came out of Apple and not out of Xerox. But I think it_s worth making the distinction between whether you want to make an effect on the company or whether the company is looking at whether you_re having an effect, and that_s all good. The bad part is when the company decides they need to tell you what to do in order to have the effect. That_s what you don_t want to see happen. Certainly in our lab, we fight that. The lab is not going to let that happen. We_re not going to let Compaq come in and tell us _you need to work on the following things and do it in the following way._ But they do come and they say, _show us what you_ve done that_s impacted the company._ And I think that_s perfectly reasonable to expect in an industrial research lab.

Margaret Wright: It_s also the job of management. I mean, at Bell Labs, the higher managers, the ones I said Director and up, their job is to go around and talk to people in the business and say look at all the wonderful things we_re doing. The individual MTS_s really don_t, and should not, in my opinion, have to worry about that. They should do their work.

Karin Petersen: Let me just add one more thing to that. In those reviews occasionally, we do get can you look into this. And I actually think that is not a bad idea. It also depends on the magnitude. If they want you to form a 30 people project that is not in your area of expertise, then it can_t happen. But if it_s a one man year to expand your project to include something that may make a big difference for them, then I think it makes a lot of sense.

Audience Question: Hi, I_m Angela Thompson, U.C. Berkeley. I expect to finish my Ph.D. in Power Systems Engineering this year. I have a question. Let_s say you are interested in either going into research and industry at a national lab, or doing some work at a start up firm in a field that is not your Ph.D. field, how many years do you think you could do the latter option before, lets say you decide to go back and using your Ph.D. to get a job in your field?

Lori Freitag: So is the start-up going to have relevance to a research field?

Audience: Yes, in more like Computer Science, but that_s not your Ph.D. field, and you might do more project management type of work, over a research type project, but it_s not in your field. I have done a lot of different types of interdisciplinary research, and had different jobs. The start-up firm that I_m interested in is not related to my research persay, but is related to work I_ve done, more like in the government and the business area, and I think the decisions that I make right after graduation might be very important because I don_t want to close any doors. I don_t want to go into *** that_s for sure, that door can be closed, but I do want to leave the door open for going back to research.

Lori Freitag: This is kind of a hard question to answer, I can just tell you at Argonne, we look at post docs up to three years after they_ve had their Ph.D., we can hire them as post docs. For us, this is kind of an attractive option because of the cost structure at Argonne and benefits, because post docs don_t cost as much as full-time people, which they cost about half actually. That is one thing. We have looked at people for post docs up the three years after their Ph.D. when they have gone into start-ups and then other things, as long as they continued to show relevance and activity in the computer science regimen. It doesn_t have to be in that particular research area. Then if we have other positions available, we always look at Ph.D.s for also the scientific programming track that I talked about at any stage, although the more senior you are, it_s much harder.

Audience: After the years, do you look very closely at what they_ve been doing after the Ph.D., or do you still put a lot of weight to see what they did during their Ph.D..

Lori Freitag: Depends which is more relevant. If you_re applying for something back into the field of your Ph.D., and of course they are going to look primarily, we would look primarily at that and what you did there and any publications that came out of your thesis.

Margaret Wright: But research moves so quickly. I mean, if you_re away from your research area, if I were away from my research area for a few years, it would take me a while to get back into it. So, if you say you want to do the start-up and then be hired as a researcher in the area you did your thesis in, I think you_d have, I won_t say it_s impossible, but you_d have to make a very convincing case that you were still able to do that. One of the nice things, by the way, I think about industrial research labs that I know of, is we don_t have slots in areas. Like we don_t want a person with this skill and this. Because you aren_t working on projects, you_re doing research. So, we_ve had candidates come in who didn_t really fit anything. They were kind of strange. They had odd credentials. And everybody thought they were great, and really liked them, and they were smart, and we made them an offer. It_s nice to have that flexibility. It just does create, I mean, you would have to sell the fact that you could get back in and do research if that_s what you want to do, and I think that might be hard. Not impossible, but hard.

Karin Petersen: We have certainly interviewed people who have gone out and been in a start-up, but almost always those people have been in the deep technical side of it. I think we have definitely shifted to valuing experience on the street much more than we used to. I mean people who say, I put this into customers hands and it worked, but from the technical side, less from the program management side.

Audience Question: This didn_t come up this morning in the other industrial panel, but I think it_s a relevant question for you guys. Is there a formal process for mentoring young new members of your staff who come in, whether they come in as either a post doc or as a regular member of staff. Not to promote to management, but just how to get along in the company and how to do well and to thrive? Or maybe as an informal?

Karin Petersen: It varies a lot of who hires you, what they want to do with you. I mean, as I said in my presentation, in the beginning Mark *Weiser looked out for me a lot, and he definitely put two pieces in place. One was that first project on which I could show success, and then he put me on my first program committee. I_m trying to do that for my people, but my immediate manager at the time didn_t do it. Now with respect to leadership. I_m in a leadership training course that lasts two years, which actually, in the beginning I was very skeptical about that I_m enjoying tremendously now. But there is nothing formal. It really is how much somebody is willing to pay attention to that new person.

Lori Freitag: So at Argonne, they have just started as a pilot program a formal mentoring program, and I decided a year ago, as I mentioned, I_m sort of going through a tenure process now and I decided I_d really like some more formal advice from senior scientists on this process, so I decided to enter the mentoring program as a mentee, and I was * with one of the senior scientists in our division. Now unfortunately, our jobs keep us both very busy and traveling a lot so we just had our first meeting two weeks ago, after I_d already done the tenure things alone. It was a waste unfortunately, but I do think it_s a good program, and in the introduction they did have a lot of things that talked about communication skills and valuing different aspects of people_s skill set. All of that was really very valuable. Mostly at Argonne it_s been informal mentoring just by going in and chatting with people, am I doing the right set of things. We also have a flat management structure, so you don_t get much formal mentoring unfortunately from division director levels just because he_s now monitoring 80 people, so it_s been a much more informal process.

Audience Question: (inaudible)

Lori Freitag: I don_t know if it_s called anything more sophisticated other than the Argonne Mentoring program, but I can find out for you.

Margaret Wright: At Bell Labs there was a situation for years in the physical sciences division there was a formal mentoring program for everybody. It was not the case in computing sciences. I think this is a topic that came up and I wasn_t asked to speak about this, and I_m on a tape so I_ll be a little careful, but I think the view of a lot of people was if you need a mentor you_re a wimp and we_re not wimps, so why should you need this? Just within the last two months, a program has been announced it_s called ECAP, Early Career Advisory Program, and every department head is now responsible for being in this program and they are going to assign people to us to mentor, who are not in our management structure. This has been received, and it_s for everybody. The other thing they used to say is well the people who can_t manage like wimps need mentoring, which was really helped with the wimp thing too. So a lot of them were saying, no I don_t need a mentor, I_m tough, I can take it. I think this may be an improvement but it_s too early to tell.

Any other questions? Okay, then I_m going to dredge up the one that we had asked, because I think it_s kind of interesting. So, we were sharing e-mail before this and we talked about our career planning. Karin made the biggest point of this in this presentation, but it was along the lines of did you plan your career and what kinds of things did you do for your career planning, and I think we can each answer this.

Karin Petersen: As I said, no. I went from deciding to go to a teaching college to going to a pretty high visibility research place. I had along the way, every single lab manager that I_ve had has worked out for me one way or another. So, although I haven_t had formal mentors, they were always what do you want to do next. I didn_t know, and if you asked me, somebody on the previous panel said ask somebody what they think the place will be like in five years. Somebody asked me, what are you going to do in five years, I would just shake my head an say I don_t know. Is that good or bad, I think what really works is try to see the opportunities. For me it_s always been, every once in a while I volunteer for work. But it_s not that I go, I really want to do it, I do it and then I show it to people, and I think that has been something that has worked. Then people come and say would you like to do this? All my lab managers have been good about it. My area managers have not been. In some sense I was lucky because I was somehow in my lab managers radar screen.

Lori Freitag: I, like Karin, fell into my job at Argonne. I went to a very small school in Pennsylvania, I was actually pretty sheltered. I didn_t really know what was going on out in the research world, and actually didn_t know there was much of a research world. Went to graduate school and had a very good advisor who had a lot of contacts, particularly at Argonne, and so I got a job there partly through that. Since then I_ve become more aware of what happens in the world around us and I also, like Karen, started volunteering for some things that a lot of people don_t necessarily like to do, like program committees. But those are excellent opportunities, again at Argonne, if you_ll recall, I said that the way you_re promoted is through external recognition, and part of having external recognition is getting to know external people, and part of doing that is serving on committees, which are typically small groups of people who meet three times a year and you really get to know people in that way. I started doing that on a volunteer basis, which then turned into a double-edged sword, with well, we understand you do these things so here_s six. I have been doing that, and that has helped me in terms of just sort of meeting people and planning what the right things are to do to get through Argonne, because I now see a much broader picture than I have before. I did do a lot of work to make sure I maintained my opportunities in *** in case I decided to go that route, so I took opportunities teaching abject courses at local universities starting at a community college, now then at UIC, and then at University of Chicago, so I actually progressed there, and in a way that will be very helpful for me if I decide to go the academic route. Other than that I haven_t really done much planning.

Margaret Wright: Well, I think you can see from mine, so I_m not from an academic family, I wouldn_t have known what a Ph.D. was really, I knew you had to go to college and I knew I wanted to get a job, and I heard computer science would be useful and they would pay you and that_s why I got a Master_s in Computer Science, and then as I told you, I realized, I think part of it is a growing awareness of what you want. And I realized I wanted to get a Ph.D. and I talked to people, and then you find out what you like. But there_s been no plan, and in fact, most of the women that I know, say, and I think they actually mean it, that they didn_t plan it. They didn_t sit down and say I_m going to do this and I_m going to do that. But I think what they have that matters is a sense of themselves and a sense that they want to succeed, and if they have good judgment about the people to talk to, you can go to someone and say should I do this and should I take this job? Should I get a post doc or should I go to a start up? One of the things that these mentoring workshops do I think are give you an opportunity to meet people. I mean, I am delighted to talk to people about what I_ve done, contact that I might have, advice I can give, I think everybody is because we_ve all struggled with this at some point and would like to make it easier for you. I mean, you have a hard enough job being technically excellent, and not all these other things. The good advice is sometimes hard to find. In my particular case, my thesis advisor didn_t have a clue about promoting me or making me visible or anything like that. I sometimes think it_s a miracle I made it at all, but it happened. But I think, don_t be discouraged if you don_t have a plan and if everything doesn_t work out. But please take advantage of people who say they_ll help you and there_s actually a lot of stuff professional societies do, ACM, NCRA, Siam, IEEE computer society, they have people who would be glad to give advice. It isn_t all good advice by the way, but lots of it is. I thought that was something that you might find interesting was that none of the three of us admit to having a plan. Probably we all secretly did. No, I don_t think so.

So, are there any other questions?

Audience Question: Mary Whittaker, George Washington University. When you_re talking about things you look at and what you_ve just been addressing, are any of you actively involved in committees like IEEE, ACM, some of those? Would you consciously join committees or volunteer if the opportunity comes up to become part of committees. Does that enter into consideration when you_re looking at applicants?

Lori Freitag: You mean if the applicant has been on committees, or would we personally?

*Margaret Wright: I do. I mean I often advised people starting their careers to get involved in scientific society. You know organize a session at a ***. It_s a great thing to do, you can do it if you_re a Ph.D. student. A couple of very successful young women I know from Maryland decided to run a couple of sessions at some Siam meeting and people said these people are terrific. Lots of people came, they had really good speakers, and it was great. Just do things like that. You can say it_s very *** because you_re doing it to become visible, but so what, that_s fine. You have to do it. If external visibility matters, you have to do it. I think choosing the right kind of thing is important. I mean someone mentioned earlier learning to say no, I think because women are in small numbers and people want to have a token woman on a committee, we_ve all done that. So they_ll say oh we have this really boring committee and we_d just love you to be on it, and you have to learn to say no. But sometimes you have to have experience. I hones your committee skills. Actually being on a really boring committee that doesn_t matter is a good way for you to learn to take over. That_s a good thing.

Lori Freitag: That is actually a good point because I started out just organizing sessions then got on some program committees and then on a steering committee and from there chairing, I mean it was a very progressive type thing. As Karin mentioned sometimes these things, if they said well you_re going to chair this conference in three years I_d say I don_t think so. But it did happen and in terms of leadership skills, it was a really valuable experience for me to serve on that committee, and it is officially part of my job description to spend ten percent of my time officially on professional service activities, with either societies or conferences or *** journals or reviewing papers or that sort of activity. So yes, we do actually look for that a little bit, although it certainly not number one.

Karin Petersen: Yes, I was going to say, it happens, but technical skills tend to balance the scale much heavier than participation, and other activities. And it_s also true that normally people who have a certain amount of experience that get involved, more heavily involved in some of these associations.

Margaret Wright: I think it can be valuable from a personal point of view for you to do these things, but it_s not, as everyone is saying, not critical for your *** in terms of getting a job.

Karin Petersen: But it_s great for networking, I totally agree.

Lori Freitag: It_s great for meeting people.

Margaret Wright: Well, I think we_re pretty close to the end of the session, so thank you all for coming.