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.


SO = Susan *O'Wicke*
SE = Susan *Eggers*
KM = Kathryn McKinley

SO I'm Susan *O'Wicke* from Intertrust. Intertrust is a small company in Sunnyvale, California.

** Can't hear.

SO Oh, can't hear. How's that?

** That's better.

SO And I would be glad to talk to any of you about Intertrust, afterwards, if you would be interested in doing that. Susan *Eggers* is the person who actually organized this panel and she is a faculty member at the University of Washington. Her research area is compilers and architecture. Kathryn McKinley is at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Her research area is compilers. I don't have lengthy introductions, but I'm going to say a bit about my own rather checkered career and I'll let them say anything they want to--

** About our checkered careers.

SO Your checkered careers. I have been employed, in one way or another, in a lot of different kinds of organizations and capacities. I have a Ph.D. from Cornell and I was on the faculty at Cornell and then at Stanford. After about 10 years at Stanford, I decided that I wanted to do something different. So I went the Industrial Research Lab which, at that time, was Deck Systems Research Center. It's the now the Compaq Systems Research Center. I was there for about seven years and decided that I wanted to try consulting. So I spent about four years as a consultant, mostly working at Silicon Graphics and as I was doing that, I was basically in a product development group and not doing research.

Then, two years ago, a friend of mind got the charter to form a research lab at this company, Intertrust, which is very unusual. They only had about 60 people at the time, so starting a research lab in a company of 60 people is pretty unusual. We now have 130 people and we have 12 people in the research lab, so it's a very significant fact of the company. So, that's my background and it kind of affects my perceptions of net working, because I've seen reasons for doing it in a lot of different places.

So what this session is about is, of course, networking and I like the idea that there's going to be a practicum afterwards, so you get to apply all of this stuff. We'll first talk about what networking is and why it's important, and then talk about, the bulk of the presentation or this discussion is how one networks. I'm going to go a little bit into doing those two things and a little bit about how one networks. Then Susan and Kathryn are going to be talking about more specific things about how one networks. They're some case studies which, I'm not sure, were we going to do those at the end or intertwine them with the talk?

** We can do them at the end.

SO At the end, okay. They're pretty informal case studies. Okay. What networking is, I like this definition, which is Susan's, making professional connections and using them wisely. I particularly like this because I have had different feelings about networking. If I had been asked to be on this panel six years ago, I would have said, if networking, I don't like the idea of it. It's just using people and, anyway, I'm not any good at it. What changed my mind about this was a conversation I had. This was at the point where I was starting to do consulting and various people had said to me, well, networking is really important when you're a consultant. I said, eeh, well, that part won't be good, but I'll see.

So, I was having lunch with a friend and I, we were talking. He'd worked as a consultant and he said, well, networking is really important. You'll have to network, but you know how to do that. I thought, well, okay. I didn't press him on it at the time and then afterwards I was wondering, well, why did he say that? Then I thought, well, here I am having lunch with this guy. I'd called him up because I know him and he's been a consultant, and I'm asking him about his experience, and I'm getting him to tell him about people that I might talk to who have been consultants, and other people I might talk to who might hire consultants. Then, that's networking.

So, I came to realize that, in fact, I had done a lot of networking and I liked doing networking. It was all a matter of the label. So, many of you are doing a lot more networking than you realize. So, the second point there, it's no substitute for doing quality work. Maybe that goes without saying, but I think it's, perhaps, something that people have funny feelings about. They think, well, is it really, one funny feeling is, well, if I do my work and do it well, that's what should count. I shouldn't have to do anything else. But, of course, if people don't know you and don't know your work, it doesn't matter if it was great work. So, there's something that's needed beyond just doing the work.

The other thing is, I've run into people saying, is this fair? A graduate student of mine, back when I was at Stanford, said, it doesn't seem fair that I'm getting an interview at IBM because you're my advisor and you know the people to talk to at IBM. I don't know whether it is fair. It is a fact that it makes a difference who you know, but you can make that work to your advantage. I think that a key thing about it is that the people who are making decisions, have got to make the best decision they can. The more information they have, say, in a job, about the job candidates, the more information they have, the more comfortable they'll feel with that decision. If they have a recommendation from somebody they know, who they respect and who they believe will be honest with them, that's going to count for something. So, in all sorts of way, you need to do the good work, but it makes a big difference if you do something beyond doing the good work.

Different styles of networking, one kind of networking is the informal kind where you just kind of do what you would do anyway, but it works. So, you might kind of guess from my introductory story, that I'm pretty much in the informal networking camp. I think it's very useful to plan and sometimes I do, particularly when I'm in the process of making a change. I very consciously go out. I didn't know it was networking, but I very consciously did and now that I know that it's networking, I know that that's what I'm doing. At other times, when I'm not in the process of change, I do other things which turn out to be useful when I am making a change.

So, I will be talking about the informal kind of networking and Susan and Kathryn will be talking more about the deliberate and formal kind.

So, why networking is important. I think there are a lot of different reasons here, but the summary would be that networking is important because it gets you out there. It lets people know you and it lets you know people. It lets you make connections and connections are a lot of how things happen to get done.

So, there are kind of two groups of things here, I think. The first group is things in which networking can kind of open doors to you and they're not the content of the research. The second part is how networking can help the content of your research.

For the first part, the opening doors, it seems to me that there are lots and lots of times in your work that you're going to benefit from having something, a resource, information, a position, whatever. For that to happen, something has got to connect you who could use this, with the person who has control of it. That can happen because you go out and find out about it or because that person knows about and so, when this thing comes up they say, oh, yes, that would be a good person. Or, it could happen because there's some intermediary who knows you and knows about the resource and puts you together. But, all of those things are things that are going to happen because you've talked to people and they know about you and you know about them and then there are those people in the middle who know about both things.

These are just examples of it: Good letters of recommendation. Also, just recommendations in general. This was certainly something I saw in consulting. When I wanted to find consulting work, what I did first was talk to people I knew, who I thought would be able to help me in various ways. In particular, for industrial positions I ended up at SGI because I knew Forest *Basket*, who I'd known at Stanford, and he was, I forget what his title was. It's Chief Technical Officer, I think, and also, Head of Research. I called him. He said, well, I don't have need for somebody like you, but I can tell you some people who would and he set up interviews for me with about five different people in different parts of the company. If I had wandered in off the street and called those people, they wouldn't have given me the time of day, but, since Forest *Basket* told them they should talk to me, they did. Through that I found a connection that got me four really good years of consulting

That sort of related to job interviews, too. Just observation, that a lot of screening for job interviews goes informally in conferences. People who are in a position to hire are always looking for people that they might be able to hire. They will be looking, particularly, at new graduate students and people who are a few years from graduating, because they want to sort of make the contacts so that when the time comes they'll be able to hire this person. So, for those of you who are graduate students, conferences are a great opportunity to get to know people. Even if you're not close to finishing, you can be thinking about getting to know people who might be sources of choices.

Getting funding, I'm glad I'm not doing this any more. That's, that was way back in the old days when I was at Stanford. But, funding agencies are also places where it's very useful if you know the people there. They may think of you when they have a special program that comes along.

Invitations to give talks. That's one of the, it's not only a result of networking, but it's a way of further networking. As you go to an organization, you will encounter people who will hear your talk and will be interested in what you're doing and will make new contacts that way.

Program committees. Program committees are an interesting sociological thing, at least in ours. I don't know how they are in other fields. Don't ever ask to be on the program committee, that's just a no-no. But, if you want to be on a program committee or if, in general, that's just one of the many good things that can come your way, it helps to know the people who know the people who are picking the program committee. A particular example of this that really struck me, some years ago a young man, newly out with his Ph.D., or I guess he was near to it. He said, I want to be on program committees and I'm not getting on program committees. How do you get on program committees? I said, well, you know, you can't directly go about it and I said this, that and the other thing. A year later, somebody in his area said to me, well, I'm looking for people on a program committee. I'd liked this guy and respected his work quite a bit. I wouldn't have recommended him just because he had brought this up, but, on the other hand, I might not have thought of him if he hadn't made that question. So, because of that conversation, he was invited to be on that program committee.

Next one, I also will say, carefully, program committees evaluate papers based on their content. However, like anything else, if they know, if you get a paper from somebody you know and you know they've done good work in the past, it will start you off with a positive feeling about the paper. If it's a point where people say, gosh, I don't know about this section. I like the paper, but I'm not sure that they can really bring this section up to where I think it should be. And somebody says, well, you know, I've worked with them, or, I know them well. I know that we can count on them to pull through. That sort of thing can make a difference. So, again, knowing, having people know you and know your work can be very valuable.

Another thing that I'm going to add to this and it comes more from industry, although I think it applies, probably, in academia, too, is that, within an organization, you often need help from people at all sorts of levels for all sorts of things. People are just generally more inclined to offer help to people if they know them and if they like them, than if they don't. I remember at SGI a point at which I needed to get some hooks put into the operating system for something I was doing. It wasn't a big piece of work. It was a few days work. It wasn't the sort of thing that you go up to the top of the company and say, can we make this change in the operating system? It was the sort of thing where you go and talk to the guy who's responsible for that part. I knew him and we had worked on various things before. So, when I came in and asked him to do that, he was receptive. If he didn't know me, he probably would have been a lot less receptive.

Then the second set of things having to do with new research, source of new research ideas. This is another thing, I think, is in companies it's really good to go talk to people in other parts of the company, because you often find out about problems which have, they wouldn't think of them as research problems, but you, as a researcher, can see that there's a really interesting research question here and you can extract it and make it part of your own work. You can get a different slant on your own ideas. Especially if you've been working in a field for a while, you have pre-set notions about how it's going to go. What this is good for and what that is good for. Talking to somebody who is naive about your field and asks you questions about it, can change your whole perception of your field. Then you can get feedback on your research, which is an extremely important thing, from people you know. People you know casually may give you quick feedback. People you know well you can ask to review papers and so on. This has a snowball effect in a sense. As you get to know people, you get to know the people they know and your whole resource tree expands.

So, I have one slide on informal networking, because what can you say about just doing what you naturally do. I say you have to follow your personal style. So, what I'm talking about is my personal style, which doesn't mean it would be a good thing for you to do. On the other hand, it does seem to work. So, I'll do what I can to pass it on.

The second thing is, serendipity happens. Serendipity, does everybody know serendipity? Okay. Everybody's nodding. The sense of, you know, you go out and you're doing one thing and in the process something comes along that is unrelated to the thing that you were doing but turns out to be really useful. For me, that's sort of one of the things that I like about life in general. So, it's not just networking or research. It sort of fascinates me that I'm in one place doing one thing and something totally different comes along. One of my favorite examples of this is, at a conference talking to a fellow researcher on performance analysis, somehow drifting into children and having him give me some really good advice about teenage children, which I will pass on to you. Don't sweat it, it's not necessarily going to be al that bad. It was a little more concrete than that.

But, anyway, so, that actually gets into the second part there, talking to people about their lives as well as their work. Obviously, I was there. That's personal for me. I like to get to know people at multiple levels. Some people don't like that. I don't ask prying questions, you know, or anything. But, if somebody mentions their spouse or their kids or their hobby, I'm likely to follow-up on it, because I'm interested. That makes a connection that, you know, is a friendship. I certainly also ask them about their work and I think people generally like to talk about their work and if you're interested in their work they will be very glad to get to know you better.

Talk to people you meet by chance. I've had some really useful things, sitting next to somebody at conference and starting to talk to them, just to make small talk, or whatever, and finding out that they actually can give me a reference to a problem I've been worrying about or something like that.

Talk to people in your own organization. I've kind of said this already, I guess. Not just researchers, there are lots of ways in which people can help you and in which you can help other people in your own organization. It's very good to get to know them.

Offer to help out when you can. Part of the way I do these things is, in looking for connections I'm often looking for the connections that would enable me to help somebody out. I like to bring two people together, if that would be good for them, or to tell somebody about a paper or whatever. Obviously, this is a way of building ties with people. I also think that, for me personally, it justifies something else. One of the things I didn't like about the idea of networking before I realized that I did like the idea of networking, was that it seemed to be very selfish or using people. That is you only made this connection with somebody because they had something you wanted. I've come to realize that, in fact, that's part of what we get from connections and part of what makes me feel comfortable with it is that I will try to help other people out. It makes me feel comfortable, not just in saying, I can ask you a favor because you did something for me, but I can ask you a favor and I may never be in any place to return it, but I'll return it by doing a favor for somebody else. So, a little bit philanthropy.

Which leads to the last thing, asking for help when you can use it. One of the things that I would have expected, necessarily, but I've found really true, is that most people, on the whole, are very glad to have the opportunity to do something for somebody else, as long as it's not too big of an imposition. You have to gauge this. One experience where I first ran into to this was, I was in Omaha, because at one part of my checkered career I left Dallas. My husband was in the Air Force and I followed him around a bit. So, actually, I was coming to Omaha from Mississippi and I wanted to get a job. I had a Masters Degree at that point. This is a town in which I knew absolutely nobody. So, how was I going to do it? I got a book and the book gave very explicit instructions, which I followed. So, I ended up calling people. Actually, what the book said was, first you call their organization and found the right person to target your letter at. Then you send them a letter with your resume and in your letter you say, I'm going to call you on Thursday, May 10th and talk to you about this. Then you call them. In the letter you've been very explicit about what you're hoping for from them, which is that either you want to find out if they have opportunities to hire somebody like you or you want to find out if they know of somebody who does. Since I was looking for programming jobs, I contacted some of the big employers, with technical slants that I thought might want to hire me directly. But, I also contacted the sales organizations for computer manufacturers, because their customers might want to hire me. In fact, it worked out very well. I talked to some people at Burroughs, I think it was. At any rate, they said, well, we're really working for this contract with the University of Nebraska at Omaha and here's a place where they might be able to use you. So, in fact, I did end up working there, it was to the advantage of the guy who made the recommendation, because he was doing something for somebody he wanted to make a sale to. So, it was a situation in which everybody benefitted. Although, unfortunately, he didn't make the sale. Nonetheless, I got the job.

I realize that there was one thing I meant to say in the last line and I'm going to say it now, because I want to say it. That is that there is another thing that you can get from networking, which is help in doing your job. What triggered this for me was hearing Jeanne *Ferrante* in the last session. Someone asked, well, how do you learn to do something like be a Department Chairman? And, she said, well, the thing that helped me most was right after I got the job, I went to the Snowbird Conference for Chairs of Computer Science Departments. I talked to all the people there. Somebody else, earlier today, was worrying about getting a job when they were from another country and how do you handle the visa issues and so on? One of the responses I got was, it's really useful to talk to other students who are in this situation, because they'll have expertise.

So, generally when you're tackling something that you don't quite know how to deal with, you can sometimes ask up, the people who are above you or who might have the power to make the decision. But, often if you ask at your own level, among your peers, you may find various forms of information.

So, I'm going to stop there. Susan is going to carry on. I'll need to leave you the slides.

SE I'm Susan *Eggers*. I work at the University of Washington. I got a B.A. in Economics in 1965. I got a Doctorate in Computer Science in 1989. So, unless you are concluding, I've set the national record for time in graduate school. I'm what is called, these days, a returning woman. I went back to school at, almost, middle age. So, the University of Washington is my first job in this field. I was hired there as an assistant professor and I will be there forever, I think. I'm still there, let me put it that way. I do research in computer architecture and in compiler optimizations. The current form of that is, in the architecture side, a multi-threaded processor and on the compiler side, we do optimization while the program is running.

I'm going to talk about deliberate networking. Partially, I think for the same reason Susan talked about informal networking, deliberate networking kind of matches my Type A+ personality. Also, I have trouble doing networking informally, because I just forget who I wanted to talk to and what I wanted to say and I let, if I only relied on serendipity, I would let a lot of opportunities go by that, in hindsight, have really served me very well.

Most networking takes place at conferences, where you're about to go, most of you. Simply because that where we congregate, we, the professional and technical community, on a yearly basis. When you're at the conferences, what you see on this slide are various kinds of people that you could talk to. In other words, who you could network with. These people are important to network with.
The first group is established researchers in your field. The reason that this group is important is because that these are the people that are going to be asked to write your letters for promotion. They are not going to ask your cohorts, your colleagues, people in your sort of status or length of time in the career. They're going to ask the big guns. So, it's a good idea if the big guns know you. Not just know you because they may or may not have read your paper, but also that they know your personality. They know your approach to research. They've heard you discuss your ideas. They get a general sense of your intelligence and your capability, not just reading the words you've put on the page in a paper. I think it's a really good idea to get to know these people and sort of keep in touch with them all through your career.

A second category of people is program directors from funding agencies. Sometimes, I think Susan already mentioned this, sometimes there is a little attitude or program directors can be predisposed to liking you or liking your work. Also, it's a way of finding out about funding opportunities. More and more now, for academics, funding opportunities are ear marked to a particular theme. So you want to find out about those so you don't miss the due date for your theme. For example, when I was an assistant professor, I met Gary *Koop* who was then at ONR at a conference and I asked if I could spend time with him, explaining my research? He said, yes. We sat down. I sort of spelled out for him, briefly, what the five projects I was working on or wanted to work on were. He said, I would like to know more about two and five, because those sort of matched what he was interested in funding. So I sent him information on two and five and he funded two. He funded me not once, but twice. It all came about, because he had never heard of me before, because I had talked to him at the conference and I must have made a decent impression upon him.

Don't rule out your contemporaries. One day your contemporaries are going to be those established researchers. So, keep in touch with them now. In fact, there are things that you can do with your contemporaries now. You don't have to wait until they become established researchers. Young faculty often trade software. They trade work loads. You're all eager beavers and so you can, by working together in this kind of way, you can sort of leverage off of each other and get your research program started more quickly. If you're in academia there's another benefit, too. You can trade lecture notes. You can trade test questions. There are only a small, finite number of test questions. So, you will always run out, that's what we did. We were all in architecture and problem sets back and forth, so no one could cheat from the previous year.

People who could hire you. This applies both to industry and in academia, other than making the contact and maybe getting your foot in the door wherever you want to interview, I found it had a very nice side effect. When I interviewed, I knew somebody at every company. I interviewed at mostly companies. I thought I wanted to go to a research lab. I knew someone, or several people, every place I interviewed. In fact, I stayed with one of them. That had a big effect. It meant that I was more relaxed on the interview and the interview went well, because I had a host I knew and liked. A lot of this came from networking at conferences when I was a graduate student.

Also, I should mention that a lot of the talk at conferences is technical. So you can get a lot of very good feedback on your work. You can get ideas for new work. You can get encouragement or perhaps, most importantly of all, people will find pitfalls in what you're doing. That is the most valuable advice you can get, I think, at a conference, is to learn what the problems are early, not late. That's a really good reason for talking to other people about your work when you're at a conference.

Here's how you might network at the conferences that are coming up. If you're sitting at a talk and you have a questions, no matter how stupid you think that question is, stand up and walk to the microphone and ask it. Chances are, there are a dozen or two dozen other people in the audience who have the same stupid question and, in fact, it probably is not a stupid question. That is a way of networking in which you meet no one, but everyone sees you and they see what is, after all, your intelligent question and not your stupid question. If you cannot make yourself get to that microphone, I realize it's extremely difficult, you can always talk to the people on either side of you or in front of you or in back of you. Talk about the presentation that's being made. Talk about the work. What did you like. What you did not like. Is there a hole here? And so forth. Or just introduce yourself and talk to them.

Everyone at these conferences has at least two meals a day in public. They might as well be eating with you. So, make lunch plans and dinner plans. Now, I realize that if you know no one, this is a hard thing to do. So, when you walk into that lunch room and you have not made a plan ahead of time, don't sit down at an empty table. Sit down at a half full or three quarters full table and just introduce yourself to the people around.

Most of the technical talk goes on at conferences while some poor soul is giving their paper. Everyone is out in the hall, jabbering away. Join them. You can do that too. In addition to introducing yourself to other people, you can get other people to sort of ease that look from you. Get your friends to introduce you. We do that for each other all the time. Get your advisor to introduce you. Your advisor is probably one of those established researchers. He or she knows everyone. Have you advisor introduce you. Your advisor will not think to do this all by himself, herself, maybe, himself, no. There's nothing wrong, this is experience speaking, just go up to your advisor and ask your advisor if he would do that or join your advisor talking to a group of people. Now, you don't want to do this repeatedly so you become a pest. But you can do it once or twice at a conference or, for sure, once. Get us to introduce you. You've now just met all of us on these panels. When you see us at our respective conferences, ask us to introduce you to people that you want to meet.

Don't sluff off people who happen to come up and talk to you. Don't always be so on the look out that you sort of miss what is right in front of your face. Talk to the people who also come up to you.

In addition to all these do's, there are also a few things that you should avoid. One of them is that you should not hang around with your graduate student friends at the conference. You already know your graduate student friends or they wouldn't be your friend. Try to wean yourself away from them. I know it's comfortable and it's safe. These conferences are huge and they're sort of, you feel absolutely anonymous there. Try to get yourself away from your graduate student friends and meet other people. That's, after all, why you're there.

This is important too. You can tell by the body language of a group of people or a duo when they're talking, whether or not you should interrupt that conversation. You can sort of get a sense if it's a private conversation, if they're whispering or if they're huddled, something of that sort. Don't interrupt those. Try to be sensitive, because you're kind of foisting yourself upon these people. Be a little sensitive to the situation that you find yourself walking into. You'll get a much better reception if you do.

You have to say something other than, hi, I'm Susan Eggers. One thing you can do is to ask the person you're talking to about their work. There is not a researcher alive that does not want to talk about his or her research ad nauseam. This is a safe and guaranteed topic. You can also ask them, get honest advice about who in the field is working on what you're interested in working on or what you, in fact, are working. That way you can, it might someone whose work you've never heard of. You might actually, then, try to meet that person and you can collaborate. You, at least, don't want to be scooped. But you should know about the literature or the related work to the research that you're doing. If you do that, however, it means that you have to have something to say about your work. This is easier to do if you think about this ahead of time. What you want to deliver is a very crisp and intelligent, very few words on what problem you're solving, why that problem is important and why your solution separates you fro the rest of the pack. The whole purpose is not just to get across to them, what you're doing, but to impress them with what you're doing and how you're doing it. I would suggest that you have like a 30 second version of this talk and you have a two minute version of this talk. You don't know exactly how long this person's attention span is going to be focused on you. Then if the person asks questions, you can go on and on as long as the person's asking questions. But, it's a really good idea to be able to say, very crisply, what it is you do and why it's an interesting research problem.

As we're now sliding into what you want to do, let me say, when I was an assistant professor. I thought about who I wanted to meet, maybe this is into the second topic here, who I wanted to meet, what I wanted to talk to them about. If I didn't do this, I would sort of get lost in the medlum of the conference and I would forget. But, I really had gone there, in part, to talk to Jim Smith about something. And then I would go home and I would wait for another year to roll around. So I always sort of thought about it ahead of time. Who I wanted to talk to and what I wanted to talk to them about. Sometimes the other way around. What I wanted to find out and, therefore, who I should talk to.

Being an assistant professor or graduate student I, of course, had no idea of who these people were, so I had to know what they looked like in order to find them at the conference. Your friends and colleagues, other students or your advisor can help you with this. You need to know who your target is, if you're going to find your target.

Home pages. I was doing this before the days of home pages. That's a very good suggestion. The last point, you might laugh at this, but I always wrote down who it was that I wanted to talk to and what I wanted to talk to them about. The reason is that I would forget if I didn't. I did the same thing after the conference. I wrote down who I had, if I was going to do something for someone afterwards or if someone gave me an idea while I was there, I also wrote it down. I would go to these conference with a little pad of paper and I'd come home and it's like completely filled. I'd go there and it's partially filled. This is the deliberate part of the deliberate networking, is that I'd put some forethought into what I wanted to get out of the conference. What I wanted to get out of the experience. Who I wanted to meet or who I wanted to meet me, I should say, ahead of time. So that when the time came for the conference, I didn't sort of forget to do something simply because I was distracted by something else. I think that's it for me.

KM I'm Kathryn McKinley I'm an assistant, almost Associate Professor, like one level away in some high administrator's office from a signature at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. My area is compilation. I was a graduate student at Rice and I graduated in `92. Then I did a post-doc for a year in France, which I highly recommend that before you start a faculty position. Then I've been at U Mass since `93. That's my, not as interesting as Susan's in terms of many different jobs. I've just kind of done this job. Before that I did hostessing and life guard, so I'm not high status things that you'd be interested in.

I'm going to talk, now, about what you do after you've met somebody at a conference and what kind of things you can do, independent of these huge gatherings where we get together and talk to each other. One thing that you don't have to do as much any more, is if you talk to somebody about your work and the act interested in it, you could send them your papers. I did a lot of this, actually. If someone was working on a related problem and I cited their work, I would send them a copy of my paper when it got accepted so that they would know that I had cited them properly, which is also an advertisement for knowing your related work well, so that you know who you should be sending this paper to.

Now, you don't have to send them the paper in mail, you send them a follow-up e-mail that says, it was very nice to meet you. We talked about my work and here's the place on the web and download and read the paper if you want to read it. I'm going to talk about cold e-mailing. I'm skipping ahead on the slide. You want to this very carefully. People are inundated with e-mail right now, so you don't want to be sending millions of people e-mails. You want to do this carefully.

If someone talked about some work of their own or you know about and you're trying to find a paper, you can ask them for their papers if you can't find them on the web. Today, most people, especially at my level, any assistant professor has any paper they've ever written carefully out there on the web with little arrows pointed at it and everything. So, this is easier to do now, but ten years ago, five years ago you had to spend a little more time collecting every work. Read them, don't just get them, read them. And then, if you have intelligent questions, you can ask them at the next conference. So you can use this as an opening to talk to senior people in your field. Let me tell you, there's not a researcher out there who doesn't like someone to come up to them and say, I just read your paper and I enjoyed it and I was wondering if you could tell me a little bit more? In fact, this is what a lot of people do, they read the paper, they have an idea and they want to make sure that you're not doing it already. So, they'll come and ask you, have you expanded in this area? If they say, no, well, then, now you're safe too, you're not going to get scooped. So you can use this to collect information as well.

The other thing that you can do, Susan already talked about this, your people on your same level will share things with you. They'll share their lecture notes. They'll share their work loads and, if you're assistants, we're always sort of looking for good programs to run on software, we share these programs. Even better, you can do collaborative work with people on your own level. I've been very fortunate in my collaborations with some people I graduated with at Rice that I continued collaborating with even after we graduated, independent of our advisor. Then I met someone at a conference and he had a paper there and I had a paper there and we were a mutual admiration society talking to each other saying, oh, I liked your paper. I liked your paper too. And then we said, oh, let's work together. Instead of not working together, we actually did. The way this happened was he was in, he's assistant professor at the University of Versailles. We met at a conference in England and we followed up. The next time he was in the U.S. he came and he stayed in my house and he stayed and we worked together for a week. We set out a research plan on a topic that was of interest to us. Then we said, oh, we need to do a little experimental work ahead of time to make sure that the direction we want to go is the correct direction. That little piece of experimental work turned into one of my most important papers, then soon to be journal article if I ever do the revisions.

I feel that, I had read, looked at his paper beforehand. I knew I wanted to meet him at this conference, but I didn't ever intend on collaborating with him. That happened, though, because we had mutual interests. We were talking technically deeply at this conference, not just talking about that I had lived in France, because we had other things in common. Those other things that we had in common helped really build our relationship and have made it a very, very satisfying research relationship for me. I believe for him, also.

The other thing you can do when you meet people, is you can ask to give a talk there. When I was, I'm in the middle of Massachusetts and there are a lot of universities right in Boston, so it's not, it takes me an hour and a half to drive to lots of top universities. So I didn't wait for them to ask me to give a talk, I had peers at these institutions on my level and I invited them to give a talk at my university and then I got the complimenting invitation back. So you don't just have to ask someone senior, can I come? Although it's a good idea, also, to ask people who are senior in your area if you can come give a talk, because them, for one, you know even though they haven't read your paper, that they've heard the talk on the work and so they might actually look at the paper at some point in the future. You get to spend a whole day getting to know them, getting to know their research lab, getting to know their students. But, you can also ask people who aren't exactly in your area and use that as just an opportunity to broaden your research interests and broaden your contacts with universities in the area. That worked out very well for me in a couple circumstances.

You should always ask to give a talk to at least some number of people in your area before you go up for tenure. This past summer, although I should have been doing this last year, but one year ago and three months, I had a baby. So I had my second son and I did not want to travel in those first four months, five months after I had him and then I didn't want to go out giving talks. I was really, really enormous. I gained 50 pounds, so I didn't want to give a talk being out to here, either. So I couldn't give a talk. I didn't feel happy giving a talk that year. So I gave a bunch of talks last summer. What I did I sent these nice little e-mails that said, I'm up for tenure this year and would you be interested in writing me a letter? `Cause I had to come up with six names of my own, so I wanted to make sure those six people were, for sure, on my list, and those people who, and there were a couple of people I felt confident knew my work fairly well, but not so confident that I didn't want to give them the opportunity to see my work in more detail. So I didn't go visit everybody, but I picked a few key people I felt would benefit from my visit. I, of course, was going to pay for my own visits and I'm cheap so it doesn't hurt them. They just have to spend a couple of hours with me that day. That was very effective. I went to IBM and MIT and one other place last summer. That worked well with my schedule in terms of trying to balance my young son and doing it in the summer, also. I had more time, I wasn't teaching.

Susan already covered this. When you're at a conference there are a million things going on. If you're going to follow-up on some things, you need to write them down, because you'll forget otherwise.

END SIDE A OF TAPE - BEGIN SIDE B

I've talked about, go to work shops as well as conferences. Go places, don't just stay home. Make sure the places that you go have people in your field that you're interested in. If you go to, go to the best conferences in your area, even if you don't have a paper in that year. Just because your paper didn't get in, doesn't mean this the year that you should skip the conference. Go anyway. There's still all the people that you want to talk to. If your paper, and, of course, if you get accepted at, your papers are not at the highest conference in your area, of course, you go to those conferences. But, don't skip the best conference in your area any year before tenure, is my recommendation. Because that's where the people you want to meet are and you'll need to talk to them.

Some of this is repeating my last slide. Help your friends. The indirect path to program committees is once you've established yourself as a researcher or gotten on a program committee, then the next year you can suggest your friend who's coming up for tenure or someone who hasn't been on a program committee and really would like to be, who you've talked to. But you have to be aware of both above and below you. You can't just look up. My advice is to look across and down. Keith Cooper, one of my advisors at Rice used to say, you never know, but the undergraduate who you were mean today, could be your program manager in ten years. Not that that's the only reason to be nice people, but it's a reason to be nice to people at all levels up, below and above you, because people grow up.

I'll guess I'll come back to cold e-mailing. If you didn't get to meet this person that you really wanted to meet because, for example, they were sick. Like I wanted to talk up Barbara Ryder last year right before my tenure case and she got sick at **. So I sent her e-mail. But, sending e-mail to people that you don't know is harder. Because, if you just send like, la-de-da, I'm Kathryn McKinley. I'm working in compilation. I've read your paper. Would you like to know more about my work? That's not an appropriate forum for cold e-mailing. But what is an appropriate forum is to follow-up on their work. So read a paper of theirs and if you have specific questions, if your research is trying to build on that work and move it in a certain area, then you can write an e-mail along those lines. But, in general, I don't recommend cold e-mailing people because everybody's e-mail queues have gotten too long and it won't get you any where and it might just annoy people.

Now, we're going to do a couple more case studies. My case study, this time, is going to be mentoring. I'm going to talk about Susan, who has been my mentor, one of my mentors, since I was a graduate student. I was in Seattle because my brother and his wife got married in Seattle in `92. So I said, oh, great, I'm going to be in Seattle. I really like the department at the University of Washington. I'll just invite myself for a visit. So I sent, I can't remember, John *Lubiere* I knew from a program that I was involved in as a graduate student. Dartsmouth had scholarships for parallel processing and he was in charge of them. So I had met John through that process. So I sent him an e-mail and I said, I'm going to be in town, can I come visit and give a talk? So, I came and visited and Susan hadn't read any of my work at that point, but she was working, it turned out, she had just started working in a related area. So we, and we made a good research contact. She listened to my talk, even though I started late because I got lost, `cause I always get lost. I should never be allowed to have a rental car. Anyway, GPS, that's the solution to this problem. So Susan, so then the next year I was interviewing and so I got an interview at University of Washington and I didn't end up getting the job that year, they chose someone else. But I think that by going the year before, I certainly showed them that I was very interested and I made this contact with Susan. Then I saw her again. Everything went well again. When I did get my job, I sent Susan some e-mails on several occasions and followed up on our conference. Unbeknownst to me, she also made a conscious decision that she wanted to help me. So I was, I had her to visit at the University of Massachusetts. I asked her to read a grant proposal on which she gave me good advice and it ended up getting funding and then when she was chair of the *Asplus* program committee, she invited me to be a member, which I met, at that meeting I happened meet the chair for the next *Asplus* program committee and then he asked me to be on the next one. So Susan helped me make contacts. She did real things for me like help read my proposal and help me. That was the first thing that I ever got funded. I felt like her feedback was very valuable in improving the proposal and helping me get funded. I just really appreciated this person, from afar, who had no stake in my career, who just like me, liked my work and continued to help me along in my career. So I would encourage those of you who are at my age to look for someone like that and those of you above to make some conscious decisions, like Susan did and benefit the women underneath you.

SO I actually, I said when we were talking about this that I would say a little about the process of setting up consulting. I have kind of, but I'll say just a tad more. When I was making this decision, I had no idea, I had done consulting as a university professor, but it's rather different to go off and do some work in a research lab with your friends than it is to actually earn your living that way. I was quite unsure about whether I would be able to do it and whether I would like doing it. So I did an initial round of talks of with people, in which I called up people that I knew who did that kind of thing and said, come have lunch with me. I figure that if I'm paying for lunch that I can get their advice and most people seem to accept that. So, I had a lot of lunches with people and asked them, what is it that you like about consulting? What didn't you like about it? How did you find your jobs? Then after I had done enough of that to think that I probably wanted to give this a try, I started using it more as a way of actually finding a particular place that I might work as opposed to generally finding out whether I would like it.

I drew on the people I knew, but what one of the things that I always asked people that I knew was, who do you know that would be good for me to talk to? And I got an expanding tree of contacts which I used until I reached the point at which I felt, in the first stage, when I was trying to decide, I felt that I knew enough, so I stopped that. Then when I was looking for places I kept at it until I found a position that I really looked. Again, serendipity, one of the ones I would never have expected was one friend I talked to about this said, well, you really should do some patent work. And I, well, I don't know. But he hooked me up with a lawyer and I ended up doing, for the first period before I got real solid technical work going, doing some patent stuff and it was actually kind of interesting and it paid pretty well.

SE My case study is also a story from my recent past. I was trained in architecture. I didn't do compilers when I was in graduate school and so, but soon after graduating I realized that there were a lot of architectural problems that I could not solve with architectural solutions. That I had to apply compiler solutions or some interaction between compiler optimization or code scheduling and the architecture. So I decided to start doing research in compilers, as well. One of the many problems that I had was that I didn't really know anyone in compiler, in the compiler area at all. So one year I decided to go to PLDI, Program Main Language Design and Implementation, it's one of the main compiler conferences. A friend of mine, Jim *Larris* whom I'd gone to graduate school with, was there also. He spent the next two and a half days introducing me to everyone. I mean absolutely everyone in compilers. So that by the end of those two and a half days, I knew all of the key players, some not so key players. I knew vaguely what they were working on and maybe, most importantly for my compiler career, they knew me. They knew what it was that I wanted to start doing in the compilation arena. So there were many results from that.

One is that I got very good technical advice from these people that I met, many of whom kept in touch with me were women. The first time I had a compiler paper rejected, they spent time with me giving me very concrete advice about how, not just how my style, I was writing like an architect. I wasn't writing like a compiler writer. How the form of the paper and the style of the paper and the kinds of things I should talk about and the arguments to make and where I should put weight, here or there. They spent a lot of time talking about to me about that. The last thing was that one of them, when he became program chair for PLDI, he asked me to be on the program committee. So that is a story in which the networking was very successful and largely instrumental in helping me really launch a research career in this new area.

Now we'd like to open it up to you. We'd like to hear your case studies or your questions to any of us. Are there any questions?

Hi, I'm Sara Graham. I'm a graduate student at Johns Hopkins. My question is with respect to going to conferences. I'm a first year graduate student so I have some vague notions of research, but I don't really have anything formalized to talk to people about. So what kind of recommendations would you make? It's very intimidating to give a talk to someone who's a renowned researcher and you're just entering the field.

SO I'll start on that one. Actually, it makes me think of my first experiencing of having my advisor at Cornell give a talk. This was very early in my graduate career and I felt a little presumptuous to even tell him I liked his talk, which I had very much. He was very pleased to have me tell him that I liked his talk. It actually meant something to him. I think that one of the things that you can do is listen to people's talks and ask them more about it. In particular, if you have, if it triggers some original thought of your own along that direction, maybe give that to them. But, mostly, when you're beginning and you don't have your own body of work to talk about, you can talk about their work and you can find out about their work from their talk or their paper.

SE I have another take on it. Actually, I didn't go to conferences when I was growing, I didn't go to conferences when I was in my first year. In fact, I didn't go to conferences until I had some research to talk about. But, that happens very early on. I don't know what department you're in, but in many departments you start research in your first or your second or, for sure, your third year. You're going to be there a long time. So you'll have three good years, probably, of going to conferences. So I just chose and, also, I suppose, my advisor also was choosing, not to send me to the conference until I really did have something to talk about.

SO I don't have anything to add.

** I'd just add to that a little bit. I've had the fortune of going to conferences before I was ready and it was okay. In that it was a really, really good way of getting an introduction to a new research area, as your experience in the compilers conference may have shown. It's just really neat to be in a place where there's all the leaders in the field and they, and one of the things that was good about being there, which was better then reading the papers, is that you'd go to a talk and then you'd come out into the hall and people would say, oh, that wasn't very good because of this. And you'd go, oh, I never heard of that before. It really twigs you in all sorts of different ways that you just can't get from just reading the papers. So if you can go to a conference, aside from this, just the networking, it's a good thing to do. The thing, the suggestion that I was going to make is business cards. To back up a little bit, my name is Susan Simmon. I'm a Ph.D. student at University of Toronto. I got a paper accepted at a conference a little while ago and, as part of that, I decided to make up some business cards for myself. They all went really quickly and I just found that it was a really useful thing to have. Put your web address on it too.

** That's a good suggestion.

** Here's a provocative question. Would one of you address the issue of unwanted attention when you're networking? Perhaps somebody in this room has experienced that.

SO Well, I assume that you mean unwanted personal attention. I will, again, just be personal about this. It was really important for me, early in my career, this is not a problem any more, but when I was younger one of the things that was hard for me was I wasn't quite sure what was going on in this guy's mind. Was he coming on to me or was I just imaging things? And a few times I ignored my discomfort and ended up having to be much more uncomfortable by making a very explicit, no. I learned from that to pay a lot of attention to those signals and to give off my own signals. Sometimes I think you just do this automatically, but some people aren't listening for those. I think the most important thing you do is you pay attention to yourself and you pay attention to what you feel about the situation. You recognize that you have the right to determine what you're willing to do and you don't have to be nice and polite if you're not comfortable.

** So, I got married when I was 22. So always in this career I've had a husband and whenever I get unwanted attention, I start mentioning Scottie all the time. I've found that very effective. I know, actually, one of my friends, who got divorced said that she would just lie and say that she was married, still, and wear her ring. I would always wear my ring also and that would discourage some of it. I've also had people, I've made some unwise choices at one point, that really taught me to be more careful in how I presented myself. A colleague of mine who I had known for three or four years, I was at a conference, I was a very, I was still a graduate student, but this person wasn't at my institution anymore but had been in my institution in the past. I thought was a friend. I invited him into my hotel room and I would suggest that you never do that. That there is only a few close personal friends that you should ever have in your hotel room. Nothing bad happened to me, but I was made to feel very uncomfortable and I just didn't recognize what was happening at all. Just because I was 25, 24, 25, somewhere in there and just thought everybody was nice, because that I had been, fortunately for me, my life experience. So, I would just say, don't make that mistake and just be, and then, after that, I was, I would just mention my husband's name earlier and often.

SE I actually can't say that has been much of a problem, but keep in mind that by the time I was doing this I was almost solidly middle aged, but once I had a technical record and once I had technical work research to talk about, I don't think that ever, ever happened. I think, by and large, compared to other communities, the academics are either more nerdy or more well behaved in this respect. I think that if you're, maybe we have to open this up to the audience for advice for this, because it doesn't seem so much that we have had problems in this area, particularly.

I'm Marcia *Durer*. I'm at a U.S. West Advanced Technologies. This is sort of to follow-up on the nerdy point you just brought up, sometimes some of the big guns or other people we want to talk to, don't themselves have very good social skills. Do you have any tips on establishing repoire so you an even start talking to these people?

SO My tip is to always to compliment their work and talk technical. I'll always start any professional contact technically and with having read their work or gone to their talk and compliment it and follow-up with something intelligent about it.

SE I would second that. They may not have social skills, but they all have technical skills.

** Back to the unwanted attention, I've gotten plenty. It's a pain in the butt. But then the network really helps too. If you know people, you're sort of not alone at the conference and then nobody can accost you, which, certainly, in one case, was really, really important. I was just always in company and so I got out of the problem. But, I almost have a counter example of something that I like doing. Every once in a while, like every other year, I go to a conference I've never been to and I try to, I mean, it sort of forces me over my own sort of attaching to people and establish a new network. So, I went to Kuaii one year. I've been to *Sigmetrics* one year. It's not my main community, but I get to meet new people and it's actually amazing how that helps, because then you can ask those people who they know that may help your work. For me the biggest thing is to just get over my own shadow, of not wanting to talk to people, when you're alone, you have to, you have no choice.

KM We have a mixed audience. So, for the new people, you really have to overcome any inertia. You have to really go out there and meet people and make contacts and be doing that every time. There are lots of new people to meet at every conference. But that's not the only thing, once you've done that for three years, or when your, whatever it takes for you to do that, then you have to follow-up with the same people. You have to build longer term, stronger relationships. That's just, that takes whatever skills you have in that area and goes beyond just talking technical. Because it does matter if people care about you, if they like you, if they've talked to you enough times, it matters to them. Then they care about if you have a bad year because you have some physical problems or you have a bad year because you have a baby. So those kinds of things are bad, not a bad year in the whole term of life, but not a productive research year because you're spending more energies elsewhere. So, if, when those things happen, if you have a network of people who care about you, who like you, those problems are less likely to have a long term impact on you and will just be the normal bumps that everybody has in their road.

SE Just to second what Kathryn said, that's really important for the people who are going to write letters for you. You need to build up that contact over the course of ten years, in fact.

Nancy Wiggin, University of Wisconsin. I wanted to know what one should or shouldn't do as far as getting on a program committee, what the issues are?

SE This is what you shouldn't do. You should not ask the program chair if you can be on the committee. It's sort of the social and professional custom that program committee chairs can ask whoever they want. They build a committee of people who's opinions they trust. And probably with whom they have worked before. Or many of them actually mentor, deliberately ask younger people to be on the committee. But, it's sort of not accepted behavior for you to ask yourself. Instead, some of the things we talked about, I didn't but Kathryn and Susan did, on the panel, is to find some other conduit to the program committee. So, you could ask your advisor. You could ask more senior researchers in your field. You could ask your friends. You could ask someone you know who was on that committee the last time. Program chairs, when they are looking for people to be on the committee, they always ask for advice. They want to know who, they want some fresh faces on the committee and they also want to know who has a good track record of doing a good job on program committees. Who will actually read the papers, give good reviews, not lobby inappropriately for someone at their own institution, things like that. So, program chairs really do ask around for advice on who to ask to be on the committee. If you're on the tip of that person's mind, because you've said something to that person, then your name will fall out of that person's mouth. That's my view, anyway, of what you should not do followed by what you should do.

KM Remind your advisor that you exist and that you haven't been on a program committee lately. Ken does that for his, my advisor was Ken Kennedy. So, he's asked to be on millions of program committees and so he can recommend some of the millions of students he has as well, or former students.

SE And not just while you're the person's student. After you've graduated too.

** What about industry, the same thing?

SO Pretty much the same thing. Just as an observation, the non-networking part of this, it's a good way to be, the first part of the pass is to have published papers in the conference itself. If you, that is the first thing you need to do. After that the networking aspects of it come in.

KM This is true, and attending the conference.

** My name is ** and I come from ** and I study at the University. According to my personal experience, first the thing you should do is publish your paper in your research area. After that, people recognize you. Then they will talk to you. You will have chance to be on program committee. That's the way I did it, to serve on a program committee.

SE One other thing on that. Program chairs are looking for a variety of skills. They're not just looking for senior people, who have a lot of experience and can bring a good over view to the idea in the paper. They're also looking for younger people who are really into details and know things cold. As a faculty member now, my students know about what their research niche is, at some certain point along the way, much better than I do. They know the related work, much better than I do. They give an enormous amount of energy to reviewing papers and giving comments. So, young faculty members and young researchers in industry are sought out because of this skill and this attention to detail and really being able to cover a certain portion of the research space really, really well. So, if you give your name or make known to someone that you're interested, chances are very good, if you have a good research record that you'll be picked up, snapped up, because program chairs are looking for you.

Barbara Simons and I have a comment and a question relating to the comment. I've had the experience of, several times now, having men approach me about wanting to, for example, be invited to an invited workshop that I was organizing or wanting to be nominated for a particular honor where I was in a position where I could nominate them for that honor. That's happened to me several times with men. It has never happened to me with a woman, no woman has ever done that. My reaction usually has been, boy, this guy's pushy. Having only my own experience to base this on, I don't know if this is a common experience of other senior women or if, I mean I expect that this happens more than I had realized, until it started happening to me. It never occurred to me, when I was in a position to ask to be invited to an invited workshop, that I would actually ask. I was hoping I would be invited, but I wouldn't ask. So, I think that there's an interesting phenomenon. First of all, we have two different ways of speaking, two different ways of doing that has been written about with men and women. On the one hand, I agree with you that you don't want to violate protocol by being to be too pushy. Women especially have to especially be sensitive to being labeled as pushy. On the other hand, you don't want to be so concerned about protocol that you're not pushy enough. It's a very fine line and I was wondering if you would comment on that?

SO I agree it is a fine line and it's, my own sense of it has shifted over the years so that I wouldn't have, some years ago, have asked the question about getting invited to an invited conference. I probably would now. I think part of is that I have my own fear of rejection which, of course, many people do and that would inhibit me. I would be afraid, well, what if I ask them and they turn me down? I've subsequently decided that it's better to ask them and get turned down sometimes than it is to never ask, because if you know that you want something and somebody else can give it to you, you have an important piece of information that they very likely don't have. So, I would now do that. You do, I suppose, run the risk that people will think less of you, but I've actually come to believe that that's not as big a deal as I thought it was. They may say, oh, well, she was a bit pushy, but they're probably not going to hold that against me in anyway that's going to hurt me in the future. So, on the whole, I'm more inclined to go for it now than I used to be.

SE You brought up invited workshops and prizes, I think. The only area in which I have just heard this said over and over is with respect to the program committee. So, I don't know about prizes and invited workshops. I suppose I err on the side of being the wall flower. I think that it something that I, or like all the women who are not asking Barbara to come to these work shops. I would feel uncomfortable doing that, personally. But I realize it is a judgment call. I would find some other way to have that person know that I would be interested in attending.

KM I haven't been on that side, so I don't know.

SO I just want to make an observation that there's a sort of pairing. If you feel uncomfortable about doing it yourself, you're likely to perceive somebody who does it as pushy. If you are comfortable with doing it, you're likely to not find the other person pushy and you're not likely to be upset about it, even if you do end up saying no. Since most of us, well, all of us here are women, and statistically the people who have these goodies are more likely to be men, and men are more likely to feel comfortable making demands, or requests, whatever, there's a chain here. So, you are going to be asking somebody who's not as uncomfortable as you are with the whole notion of asking for what you want. So you might use that to make yourself feel a bit more comfortable with the process.

** Just sort of as a matter of experience, I was program chair for, as Kathryn mentioned, at *Asplus* and a lot of, no one said to me, I want to be on your committee. A lot of advisors called me up with suggestions.

I'm Joanna Dilly from Bell Labs and I had an example in this area. Someone wanted to be recommended for something at Bell Labs and he came to me and he said, I would really like to do that. If the opportunity ever arises and you get a chance, please recommend me. So, he didn't ask for a yes or no answer. He didn't ask for a commitment from me that I would, but it stuck in my mind. I had a lot of time to evaluate whether I though he'd be good at it and when the chance came, I recommended him. So, knowingly explicitly what somebody wants, can be very helpful. That was a nice way, I thought, of asking for it.

KM This is exactly what we're talking about, just said better than we have said it. She wasn't the person in charge at the time, but he let her know that he was interested in that.

Margaret Simmons from San Diego Super Computer Center. You know, I used to be very shy about asking that sort of stuff until I ran a series of work shops. Then I found out how many people asked me, it was an invitation only workshop. I got to where I didn't feel bad about evaluating their request on it's merits and saying no when it didn't happen. The same was also true when I was program chair and certain people asked to be on the program committee. If it was somebody that I might have invited, had I thought of them, then I didn't feel bad about saying, of course. I think that Susan *O'Wicke* is right. Once you're comfortable in that milieu, then you don't mind asking when you want to be invited to something, because I know how I responded to the people who asked me for invitations. That's primarily from one particular arena, which is high performance computing. It's not really from the academic side so I don't know if it's the same in that area or not, but that's one person's experience.

Hi, I'm Margaret Wright from Bell Labs. I just want to throw something into here. If you can frame the question so the person does not feel uncomfortable saying, no, but you've planted the seed, that's what you should do. So people have come and said, I want to be an editor of your journal. Then you really have to say, well, I'm sorry, you can't. Which makes me uncomfortable and then they feel terrible, but if they had said, I'm interested in getting involved and I'd like to find out about how I can become an editor, then I have an out. I can make a generic answer. But, I then know that that person is interested. So, I think some of the awkwardness can come from how you put the question. I think the points you've all made about getting your names into people's minds, are really what matters. If they want you to be on this committee and they know you're interested, I think they'll ask you. If they don't want to say no, then it gets very awkward.

Hi, I'm ** from the University of Pittsburgh. In terms of making connections, one nice thing for me was to sit in my supervisor's seminar class during my last semester. I got to know many people from around the University which I wouldn't have known otherwise and we were sitting there for the whole semester being interested in similar topics. It was a very nice experience for me.

SE I think Jan Cooney has an experience like that. Don't you? Where someone in a different department_

** I guess I can just say it generically. I think another form of networking is people outside of computer science, I'm Jan Cooney from the University of Oregon. When I moved to Oregon, this isn't that momentous that I need a mike. When I moved to Oregon, I happened to move next door to a chemist who is just an amazing woman in many ways. She invited me over to do *FEMO*. So I went over there and I met a bunch of women, professors at the University in all different departments who did *FEMO*. *FEMO* it's like, it's not a drug, it's a kind of a clay thing that you make jewelry out of and you bake in the oven. We'd sit around and we'd do this *FEMO* and I got to know all of these women and through those contacts I've gotten many things that I wanted in the University. So, when I wanted something, they knew which administrator I should to. They introduced me to these administrators. They warned the administrators that I, so they helped me out in that way within the University. Then they helped me outside of the University too. This woman, who had started the *FEMO* group, organized some big seminar that the National Academy of Science ran for young researchers to come and meet, young researchers in different disciplines. So, I got invited to that because she knew me and nominated me. So, part of the trick in getting invited to things is being nominated for them. The networking that you do, don't discount anybody. I think you should make an effort to have professional contact or semi-professional contacts over *FEMO*, however you want to do it. You should really promote these contacts and I think they pay out in a lot of ways.

KM I want to follow-up on that. I had spent a year in France where it was very difficult to make friends. So when I came to the University of Massachusetts and then there are no young women in computer science in my department, I'm like, oh, I can't do this for another year. So at the new faculty meeting, I sat down next to two women and I said, let's have lunch together every two weeks so that we know somebody and then we can also talk about what this University is like from our different perspectives. So, we've had lunch and we've had other women come and go through this whole thing and we still have lunch every two to three weeks and it's been, and now we've all, many of us are going through the tenure process together. We've been very supportive and helped each other, giving information about how the different departments are doing it. What are rights and responsibilities are. It's just been incredibly rewarding as my personal relationship, but it's also been very, very widening in terms of the University and then they meet new people and invite them into the group, so I always have a constant stream of new people. I would highly recommend that you do some of this informal lunching with people outside of your department, in other areas and for me, I wanted to have some young women friends and this just worked out incredibly well for me.

I just have a comment. I have an example of how important business cards can be. I was working on a work term in Japan and one day my boss ran into the office, basically, and said, okay, I don't have the time to do a demo for these two visitors. Could you please do it? I sort of, I'd watched him do a demo before, so I said, sure. Practically five minutes later these two people came by and I did a five minute demo, that's all they had time for and one of them was from the University of Toronto. I just had enough time to say my name and that I was interested in grad school and gave him the business card, because I had them always with me. Some months later I got a package inviting me to do graduate work at the University of Toronto. So, it's very important to have those with you.

SE I think that's it for this session. One more announcement. I'm done. Thanks for coming.

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