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.


TL = Teresa Lunt
JF = Jeanne Ferrante
MLS = Mary Lou Soffa (Moderator)

MLS: I think we can start. Can you all hear me? Great. I_d like to welcome you to this panel. It_s on career options beyond research and we have three panelists who have had very different experiences in some type of non-research or it_s real administrative roles. The panelists are Teresa Lunt, who in fact was a director for a government agency which she_ll talk more about, as well as for industry. Jeanne Ferrante, who, although she doesn_t put on her biography that she was a chair, she is still chair of the University of California at San Diego. And myself, I_m Mary Lou Soffa, and I was the graduate dean at the University of Pittsburgh for five years. So we_re going to be, we_re going to organize the panel by each one of us talking a little bit about our experiences and then open it up for questions. The, we kind of organized the panel answering certain questions. We first of all want to talk about our responsibilities that we had with our jobs, and then things such as how we got the jobs, why we wanted to take administrative jobs when we were involved in research, what were the accomplishments and what are some of the lessons that we learned and also, what are the lessons we can give you, or some suggestions that we can give you.

So we_ll start with Jeanne being the first panelist. I want to just read a little bit about so that you know something about her in terms of research. Jeanne got her Ph.D. from MIT in mathematics in 1974. She was a research staff member at IBM TJ Watson research center from 1978 to 1994. And as I said, she_s currently professor and chair of the computer science department at the University of California at San Diego. He work has included the development of intermediate representations for optimizing and parallelizing compilers, most notably the program dependence graph and the static single assignment form. Those of you who are in languages will appreciate both of those pieces of work. Her interests also include optimizing for parallelism and memory hierarchy, multithreading and predicated execution. Okay, Jeanne?

JF: Thanks, Mary Lou. So as Mary Lou mentioned, I am currently the chair of the department at UC San Diego. And I think most of you probably know what that means in terms of a job, I_ll say more about that as we go along. In Mary Lou_s outline, one of the first questions she asked was, well, how did you get the job. And I always find this an embarrassing question because you have to say you agreed to do it. And the truth was, I didn_t really want to do this. And when I came to UC San Diego, this is my fifth year, and in my second year, the department chair asked me, well, did I want to be vice chair for a quarter, because the person who was vice chair was leaving and he was going to give me a course reduction, and I said, I_ll try that, but this doesn_t mean that I have any idea of being chair. But low and behold, something happened in the interim, and when I think about, you know, how this happened, I think it was a combination of arm twisting by the dean and Tom Sawyering by the former chair, and also I think, a sense of responsibility in terms of, you know, really wanting the place that I_d just come to to be a really great and even better place.

So, let me say a little bit something about the Tom Sawyering aspect, because this is interesting. So the former department chair came to me and said, _You know, I think we could set this up so that you could still do research in this job,_ and so I have to say that, you know, I was at IBM for 16 years and had resisted the entire time I was there of being manager, and here I immediately arrive at UCSD and I get arm-twisted into this chair job. But I actually found this intriguing, and I was thinking about this before, I think I really resisted being a manager at IBM because I never really felt comfortable with the power structure or the authority structure in industry and I feel much more comfortable in academia, so it, when I started thinking about, well, yes, you know, we could set this up in a way, and what we came up with is a distributed vice chair structure, so there are actually three vice chairs, which are independent from the committees, we still have committees that basically run the department. And so we managed to set things us so that there are three people to whom I can delegate things and that_s actually worked out pretty well. And I actually have been able to continue to do research, although, you know, it_s of course always a struggle to get time as it can be.

The challenge in taking this job, I think, has been that, and it was also one of it_s attractions, I didn_t really have any training to do it. It_s like, you know, when you first become a parent and you say, well how can I possibly be doing this? I really learned on the job to do the job and you know, we do this as researchers as well, we learn to be researchers, and the interesting thing about it was that I had to go back to basics. Okay, you know, I_ll use common sense and what happened was I found that I could actually do that. Low and behold, you can use common sense and try to operate on the basis of, you know, principles of fairness and so forth, so forth, and it actually worked. And what was interesting for me, as this went along, is that I actually developed a confidence in myself which was really independent of the kind of confidence that you get from doing research or whatever, in terms of, you know, operating, in terms of being able to make decisions, and actually also in being able to speak with some authority to people and have them listen to you. And that_s in fact become very comfortable and I_m not sure I_m giving that up. But one of the first things that I learned is that you can_t please everybody in a job like this. I mean, people are often coming to you and making requests and want special this or special that. And it_s important to listen to people and hear what they have to say, but in the end, you can_t please everybody and so there_s no point in trying. You really just have to make what you think is the right decision, stick to it, and really, people can live with that. You can say no to people who are your friends and colleagues and they will get over it. They won_t hold it against you forever. Humor is very important in those kinds of things. But if people have a sense that you really are trying to be fair and operate fairly with people, you know, they can get over disappointments.

So, really there were more opportunities in this job than I thought when I first took it. As I said, I was totally reluctant. Somehow in a moment of, I shouldn_t say in a moment, I really think also, I had a strong sense, when I took over as chair, the department was in a rather bad budgetary state and I really felt like if I could get this and this and this from the dean, we_d be in much better shape. And so we began this sort of negotiation which was rather heated and so forth, and in the end I won. And then I thought, oh no, I won. Now I have to do this. So, it was, it made me realize that there were a lot of aspects to what you could do at that level that I hadn_t really thought about before. I mean, I hadn_t really been involved, been involved in the department and been on committees, but you sort of see things in a much more global way in terms of how things can grow and develop, and so forth. It was very important to me to continue a tradition that we have in our department of really thinking about what_s best for the whole department and we really have a very nice atmosphere in our department in which people really do think that way. And so we_ve, that has meant that we have to take time to build consensus. That was something that was hard for me to learn at first because I_m a person who likes to make check lists and cross things off and that_s part of my sense of accomplishment. But you can_t always do things that way when you_re working with a group of 30 or so faculty who all want to have their say, even if they all agree. So, taking, you know, that was one learning experience was taking the time to really build consensus, and also to not set too many goals for myself. I_ve basically tried to, every year, besides the usual stuff of running the department, just to set one or two projects that I wanted to do, or things that I really wanted to foster. So for one year, really one and a half years, we worked on putting together an NSF research infrastructure proposal, and we got that. And this past year, I_ve been working on putting together a departmental industrial liaison program. So, what I didn_t really anticipate was that there was really a lot more opportunity for personal growth in this kind of job of a kind that I really hadn_t had before. And I found that there really, in terms people skills and my own sense of myself and self confidence, really was a very positive experience. I know I can handle pretty difficult situations now and you know, do so with some calmness, which is very important. I learned that I have to keep my ego out of a lot of this kinds of decision making. And view things realistically. And I_ve really felt like a lot of the accomplishment has come from seeing the larger enterprise and the people in it grow and develop. I really feel like the department_s been on a strong upward trend and we_re moving in the right direction, and that_s given us a sense, a really positive sense of ourselves. And so part of what, I feel like the chair should be doing is keeping that going.

I have to also say that this is my last year as chair, so this is somewhat strange to be on a panel talking about this as a career. I think at a certain point this year, I just decided, you know, I_d really done this long enough. It was time to go back to research. I really didn_t want to give that up. So that_s what_s going to be happening, and I think though it_s made a permanent impression on me and you know, I don_t really know if I would go back to something like this in the future, I don_t think I will for awhile, but it_s been a lot more interesting and a lot more varied than I thought it was going to be, and really made me see things at a much higher level in terms of research areas, etc. than I did before. So it_s been a good experience.

MLS: Thank you Jeanne. So our next panelist is Teresa Lunt and Teresa is a principal scientist at Xerox PARC, where she is in the secured document systems group. Prior to joining Xerox, she was associate director of the computer science laboratory at SRI. From 1994 to 1998 she was assistant director for distributed systems at *Darpa_s* information technology office, where she had oversight of programs on distributed computing, secure networking, information survivability, adaptive systems and software enabled control. She also developed and managed *Darpa_s* information survivability program and was instrumental in the development of *Darpa_s* information assurance program. Prior to her four years at *Darpa* she was the program director for secure systems at SRI International where she led the development of the *Seaview* multilevel secure database system. Teresa?

TL: Thanks. Can you hear me? Can you hear me in the back? Okay. So I_m now at Xerox, but I_m not going to talk to you about Xerox, because I_ve only been there for a few months, but, and I_ve been a researcher for much of my career, but, and these are things that I did, that I_m going to talk about today, that are non-research aspects of various roles I play that, some of them were in addition to research I was doing at the time and some of them were full time. So at *Darpa* where I was for, essentially the past four years, 1994 to 1998, I started as a program manager, so I_m going to go through the same format, with answering the six or seven questions. What was the job, why did I take the job and so forth. So, this is describing what the job was. Basically, as a program manager at *Darpa*, you_re responsibilities are to create programs and that involves having some vision for what you_d like to accomplish over, say a four year program, developing technology that will have an impact for say another decade and selling that program. So, creating your own vision and conveying that vision to the people from whom you_re obtaining funding, and then also conveying that vision to a research community, so, which can be very difficult, because usually these folks have a big investment in what they_re already doing, and for the program manager at *Darpa* to accomplish the goals that they_ve promised, to deliver on, you_ve got to sway the community to actually want to work on the problems that you_ve identified. So, that_s part of the job, developing and nurturing a research community, and then showing results. So you_ve got all of these brilliant researchers at universities for the most part, inventing new ideas, but what you_ve promised is technology, so you_ve got to go and find, help them find partners and hopefully partners who might want to commercialize some of these technologies and then show their usefulness to the Department of Defense, who is after all paying for them. So it_s actually quite a challenging job. Before I went to *Darpa*, I sort of had the vision that these were administrative positions where you_re kind of pushing paper around, and I_ve never understood why it took so long to get money out of them and all this other stuff. But it was actually quite a learning experience for me, and finding out how things really worked on the government side, and developing the skills that you need to do this. Because I came as a researcher with fairly narrow interests in computer security and only actually certain aspects of computer security, and here I was starting a program where I had to have a much broader view, and since I_m spending the taxpayer_s money, I can_t just fund things on my pet interests, I have to look at what_s the best thing for the nation. So it_s actually, it was quite a learning experience to develop that point of view.

While I was at *Darpa*, I was promoted to assistant director for the office I was working in, the information technology office, and in that role, I had responsibilities for managing people who were doing this kind of thing on other programs, mostly related to distributed computing, some programs on control and networking, and some areas, so most of these areas were not areas I was working in, although I had worked with people, collaborated with people in the past, so it raises a new set of interesting challenges, because now you_re managing people who are really the experts in their field, but my role was really guiding them, helping them develop the skills so they could develop a program, develop the vision and then express the vision to sell the program and then helping them to guide and nurture that research community. So a lot of this was mentoring kind of activity, as well as special projects that you get asked, you know the director would ask, like one example of that was, the director of *Darpa* was planning a trip to Silicon Valley, and so I_d get asked to figure out who he should visit and make all the arrangements, so there_s some very administrative aspects to the job as well. I mean, I skipping over a lot of the just paper work aspects as you can imagine, there_s all keeping track of the dollars and how many dollars you have and how much you_ve spent, and putting contracts in motion and all that stuff, but there_s, you actually have quite a bit of administrative support to help you do that, so I didn_t actually do a lot of hands-on working with spreadsheets and all that, I always had people helping out. Although that_s pretty much up to you how much you want to get involved in those kind of details.

Why did I, okay, how I got the job. I think how I_ve gotten every job is through personal networking. So I happen to know that *Darpa*, from top levels in DOD, *Darpa* was being asked to create a program in security and that there were no program managers at *Darpa* who were interested in doing that, so I knew there was money available, I knew there was an opportunity, so the first thing I tried to do was find somebody who wanted to go to *Darpa* to create a program, because for me, the payoff would be there would be all this money available in my field and I can apply for funding. So I sent a few people over there to interview, none of them were actually interested in the job, so I ended up going. But the way I actually got the job was, I knew enough people in the right places, including some of my colleagues who knew people in these places, that I could be highly recommended to the people making the decision, recommended by people who they knew very well and respected. So that_s basically how I got it. My husband also took a job at *Darpa* at the same time, which made it very easy for us. Otherwise, neither of us probably would have gone.

Why I wanted the job. Well, at first I didn_t want the job, because I didn_t want to live in Washington, having lived in California for the previous 10 years, but the biggest advantage of the job, in my opinion, was the impact you can have on the research community. You have a much bigger impact than you would ever have as an individual investigator. And although you have to give up the opportunity of doing your own research for the period of time you_re doing thins, during that time you are creating new directions for a community and seeing the results. And seeing the results was really very rewarding. The new technologies that were coming out and the new directions, the security community had been a very small, kind of ingrown community for many, many years and working on problems, which in my opinion, were kind of non-problems, or used to be problems, but the world was moving on and the community wasn_t and so I had the opportunity to help push them in directions that are going to be much more fruitful, fruitfully applied to commercial problems and new problems arising with world wide networking. And so, to me, that_s the big draw of this job, you want to, if you_re in a position in your career where you_re ready to play on a bigger stage, have a bigger impact, and considering also, this is not a permanent position. You always go back to your research job afterwards. This is a big opportunity. Also, I didn_t realize it at the time, but it_s also a very good opportunity if you_re thinking of a big change in your career, because you get exposed to so many people who can, and so many opportunities that when you go, you_ll have many more contacts than when you came. So there_ll be many more opportunities and people will be coming to you, wanting you to be there.

So, what did I accomplish? So I started a new research area called system survivability, which is continuing at *Darpa*, and in fact is one of *Darpa_s* top 10, one of their top 10 priorities. Of course new funding for security research, which is quite abundant right now, which wasn_t at the time. In fact, at the time I left SRI to do to *Darpa*, I was having to lay people off because there was no funding to be had. Basically the red menace had gone away, the Communist menace had gone away and nobody felt like, you know DOD didn_t feel like well, we had this enemy any more, so we don_t need security any more. Also, now survivability and high confidence systems are a major research theme of the Federal government and I had a large part in helping to make that happen. And this high confidence systems is really dependability, reliability, safety and security, so it_s much broader than the security and survivability kind of programs that I was working on at *Darpa*.

So so much for *Darpa*. Before I went to *Darpa*, I was, oh, there_s more. I was supposed to talk about personal growth and lessons learned. Okay, so basically, my personal growth was that I_ve, I_m recognized now by a much broader community of people than ever would have known me as an individual investigator, and so, and I get invited now to participate in things like national academy studies or Air Force science board kind of things, where you know, and some of these can be pretty tedious, but you also have an opportunity to really make a difference on a national level. And so I would never, probably never had those opportunities before. And new skills on how to sell a research vision to a community of people both who are expected to carry out the vision and who will be funding that work. And what did I learn? Basically the thing that you really need to succeed in a job like that is to have a vision and be able to convey it to others. And if you feel that you_re a person who has this, I mean a vision for your field of endeavor, as opposed to what you want to do in your own personal research, you might want to consider a job like this, because you can really accomplish an unlimited amount in this kind of a job.

Okay. Before I went to *Darpa*, I was a manager at SRI and SRI_s a research institute that_s funded almost entirely by external contracts. And the group I was in, I was in the computer science lab, and that is almost entirely funded by government research contracts. This is different from most of the industrial labs that you_ll hear about here, where there_s internal funding for the most part. So, part of the job here is to ensure that there_s funding for the people in your group. So I was managing a group of about 10 people working in computer security research and so, a big part of what I had to do was to develop those relationships with the funding agencies, write proposals, and get them interested in what I thought we wanted to do and all the things you have to do with building those relationships. Which can be quite time consuming. And on top that, managing the group, so there_s a lot of the usual personnel issues and career development kind of things. And actually, I found it to be quite a relief when I went to *Darpa* that I didn_t have a staff so I didn_t have to worry about career development for people. I do like managing a small group. Ten I think, was a little bit too much. But a new responsibility that I had to take on at SRI because they_re, like many Silicon Valley companies, trying to commercialize on their intellectual property, so part of my job became planning for technology commercialization, so we were trying to commercialize some of the technologies that I had developed, that my group had developed, and that other groups in our lab had developed. So that, I think, is going to be increasingly part of any research manager_s job these days.

Before I was associate director there, I was directing this secure systems group. The difference, really, between those is as associate director, I also had responsibility for this group, but they also wanted me to help develop new research areas in the lab in the areas of distributed computing, attract staff and attract funding for that, and in today_s climate, that_s actually quite difficult, particularly recruiting staff, when there_s so many other interesting things they could be doing at other places.

So how did I get this job? Again, this was through personal networking. I had been working, prior to this, at another company in the Bay Area in the research group and getting funding from government agencies and through the people that I would meet at the contractor meetings, I got to know folks at SRI, and so they were close by to where I was working, so I ended up going there. And it turned out to be great because the woman, Dorothy Dunning is the woman that recruited me there, and she was always quite a big presence in computer security. Through her, I was able to meet some other people who had quite an influence on my own research, and so it ended up being really a good thing for me. So this was my first mentor and I learned quite a lot from her. In fact, a lot of what I was able to accomplish both technically and personal growth wise in my career, I really have to attribute to working with Dorothy.

Why I wanted the job was the opportunity to work with first-rate researchers. And I think this is really important for any researcher, that you work in an environment that will challenge you technically and where you can learn and grow from the people around you. And my accomplishments there were largely technical, even though my, I had a managerial position for much of my time there, I still define my accomplishments by the technologies we were able to develop, because a lot of the management I was doing was technical management and making sure that we were making progress on technical problems and that we were producing demonstrable results.

And as far as personal growth, this is where at SRI is where I really established myself as a computer security researcher. And I engaged in a lot of community building activities. Computer security, especially back then, was a very small field and I was starting research in new areas, one of them was intrusion detection, which back then, I really had a hard time discovering who else might be working on this. Today there_s lots of people working on it, but basically my work together with Dorothy at SRI really launched this field, so we started holding meetings and I started a series of bi-annual meetings at SRI and we really built up a community around that. We did, and I did a similar thing with database security, when we started working on that topic. And so, and through that, I was able to really extend my contacts through the community. So that was really valuable to me. And then lessons learned, I think working with a mentor and some very, very good technical people, I think is the really, a really invaluable thing. If you have the opportunity to do that, that was really the best thing that happened to me there at SRI. And advancement there was demonstrated through team building and fundraising abilities, surprisingly not through technical achievement. Seems the company measures your accomplishments in terms of how big of a group can you manage to put together and fund. So this was really how I was able to become a manager. This is probably true in a lot of other places. And at SRI, and I don_t know how much this is true at other labs, but every manager is their own small business. And almost every researcher is their own small business, so you_re, you can work on anything you want to, provided you can find somebody else to pay for it and you can hire anybody you want to, provided you can get money for them. And so someone has described SRI as a farmer_s market and that_s basically how it is, although they_re trying to change that a little bit. So there was really nobody in management who felt it was their job to make me succeed. So you basically, if you want to do this, you_re on your own, you learn how to do it by yourself and there_s nobody there showing you how to do it or telling you how to get funding or how to write a winning proposal or any of that. You just kind of learn by doing.

How am I doing on time?

MLS: One more slide would be great.

TL: Okay. So in addition to that, while I was at SRI, a friend of mine and I started this small business publishing a technical newsletter called the Data Security Letter. And this was a very interesting experience for me. It was a spare time activity, so it was a very, very small business. There was just the two of us. Why I did this was this guy I was, who was my partner, he had hired me at a previous job and he was, he had been the founder of the company *Scitech* it was called, that I was working at at the time, and he later sold that company for some enormous amount of money and so he was independently wealthy. He was a proven entrepreneur and now he was interested in starting another small company and asked me to partner with him. So I thought I might actually learn some interesting things by doing this. Of course, we had all these ambitions that we were going to be big business, not a small business but we always stayed a small business. So the things I learned here, I learned a lot about newsletter publishing but I also learned a lot about running a small business and dealing with customers and all that. Actually, this benefitted me in ways I didn_t really expect, because the newsletter was a very high priced, prestigious kind of thing and so the people that subscribed felt they had some kind of personal connection with me, I was the principal contributor to the newsletter as the editor. And so I would meet these folks at conferences and stuff and some of them would ask for autographs and things like that. I mean, it got, also I mean a lot of the people who subscribed were people working for foreign governments who would then invite me to visit them and pay for my travel and all that, so it had some side benefits. And so this helped establish my reputation beyond the normal places I had access to. So other businesses, including foreign businesses and foreign governments.

So, that_s all I have to say.

MLS: Thank you Teresa. So I_ll be, I_m the last panelist. And as I said, I_m a professor at the University of Pittsburgh. I_ve been there for 22 years and my research areas is programming languages, in particular I do program analysis, optimization and also do some work in software engineering tools, debugging and testing. And as I say, I was the graduate dean at the University of Pittsburgh for five years. The reason, or what happened was that the ad for the dean came across my desk and I looked at it for a minute and threw it in the garbage and that was the end of it. And then after the deadline, I got a call from the search committee saying would I please apply for the job. I unfortunately told my family and they wanted to know what a graduate dean did and I didn_t have the foggiest idea. But they encouraged me to apply, which I did. And I remember going to the office, which was a big office, the first day, sitting down at my desk and saying, _Now what do I do?_ And I really didn_t know what I was going to be doing as the dean. Now I do know, after five years. And so the graduate dean is responsible for, essentially the academic programs of all the departments, and I had 26 departments under me. So I had natural sciences, social sciences and humanities. So in fact, I was in charge of the graduate programs for all of these in terms of their quality and their viability. I was supposed to be instituting policies and procedures for making sure that the quality is maintained. I also was responsible for allocating about 580 TA_s to the departments, which gave me a lot of power, money. And also allocating about 50 to 60 fellowships a year. The other big responsibility I had was to try to, if there were problems to identify problems and try to resolve them.

Okay, so that was kind of a bird_s eye view of the position. Why did I take the job? At that point in my life, I was feeling a little stale. I had just taught an introductory data structures course to about 200 undergraduates, which was, I thought it was a very exciting course, and they didn_t seem to think it was that exciting. And so I was a little discouraged. And I thought I needed a new challenge in my life, and so this was an opportunity. I had also served on a University committee where we were always complaining to the administration that they did not have enough women in the top administrative positions, this glass ceiling. And that came back to haunt me. And it was true. If I_m going to be complaining about something, then I should be willing to do something about it. So there was a lot of pressure from the administration, as well as from these women that I had been complaining with to the administration. And I think the third reason for taking it was that there was some problems that I could see, and I wanted to know, if in fact, although people said you couldn_t do anything about the problems, they were just going to be there. I wondered if there in fact wasn_t something I could do with the problems.

Now I felt in some ways, what Jeanne said, I really enjoyed my research and I was concerned about giving that up and so I made an agreement when I took the job, that I would be able to spend a day and a half in my faculty office doing research. And I laugh because I could have asked them for three days and they would have said yes, knowing that I was just going to find the time somehow to do the research as well as the work. The work took more than five days, and they knew it when I said that to them. But they said, _Sure, you could do that. No problem._ But I ended up doing, not a day and a half. That was too much. But I ended up making sure that one day a week I went up to my research office, and that was really very key, and I_ll say this later on. Because I didn_t know if I wanted to be in administration full time and for the rest of my career.

So when I took the job, I had specific goals that I wanted to have, and I think that_s really important. So when I step my foot into the door, I knew that there were certain goals. And some of them, the majority was, or the main goal was I wanted to improve the minority representation in the graduate programs. At Pitt at the time, there were very few minority students in graduate programs. It was atrocious. Now, I_m not talking about science, I_m talking about all of them. Humanities, social sciences. So I really wanted to see what I could do there. I also wanted to try to improve the representation of women in the sciences as well as the environment. So those were my two major goals. There were other things. The information systems were terrible. I remember sending one of my women graduate students down to the dean_s office to look for fellowships and they pointed her to a filing cabinet and said, _Go look at all those flyers._ And they were all out of date. So I wanted to really provide something that the students could come down and find fellowships, because I had heard all along that there were a lot of fellowships available for students, and they go unused, so I wanted to make sure that we at least knew about them. And then of course, to try to improve the quality of some of the programs that I knew were not particularly good.

So those were my goals. The challenges. One of the major challenges was trying to find the money and Teresa pointed that out. I knew I needed money for some of these programs, and so I needed to find the money and I either had to go through an external agency or get it from the Provost. Now, the Provost, as you may know, when you go down to a Provost office and say, _I need money,_ they_re going to say, _Okay, who should I take it from._ And so that_s the game that they play. Well, I ended up telling them who they should take it from and I did get some money for a lot of these programs. But that was certainly something I was constantly doing, trying to get money. Another challenge was to try to get the departments to evaluate themselves and to look at themselves. Even when I hear other people talking about their departments, it_s easy to look at your department a certain way, but if you look at externally, it looks a little differently. And so I was trying to get them to do that. That was another challenge. The other, a third challenge was getting departments to buy into what I was trying to propose. And Jeanne mentioned that, about consensus building. And it_s very important. If you want your programs to succeed, and I realized that fairly early into my tenure, you had to get people to buy into it. Teresa also mentioned that. And so that was a challenge of how do I get them, to in fact, drop their Ph.D. programs, in fact, if they weren_t doing very well at Ph.D. production. And then I knew there were some problems with women students, and I wanted to resolve those. The biggest challenge, though, was dealing with the faculty and this was very strange for me, having been a faculty member and still considering myself a faculty member, and then having to deal with them from a different perspective. And so all of a sudden, I was a faculty member one day, the next day I was a dean and all these friends of mine were antagonistic to me, because I was now an administrator. And they were, some of them were just impossible to deal with, and so that was a big challenge. How do I deal with a lot of these egomaniacs who felt that the world revolved around them. I ended up dealing with them, but it was difficult to learn how to do it.

So what are the accomplishments? I was able to attack the problem of minority representation in the graduate programs. And so in the three years I really worked on this program, it took me a couple years to get the money, we in fact doubled the representation of minorities in the graduate programs. And in the sciences alone, I increased the representation by 70%. So, I mean, I certainly had the help of the departments, but they bought into what I was trying to do and they worked hard and we ended up, it was amazing, how well we did.

I provided support programs for women, when I felt that they needed some. I developed a complete information system that we could find about fellowships now it was linked all over the place. All the student had to do was to come down and push a button on a computer and it would, and write some information, and it would send them to the fellowships. We had information about the programs. Things such as, what_s the acceptance rate was. Some of these departments said, we_re great departments, we have all these students applying, and then I said, _What_s your acceptance rate?_ Well it turned out to be 100% and then you have to think about whether or not, if they accept every student who applies, what quality program they have.

I developed a unique program with CMU in that we had such few minorities at Pitt and they had such few minorities in graduate programs at CMU, that we put them together. And that was really very good in terms of networking. That program was really, really well. And another accomplishment, which took me four years, was that Pitt finally developed a consensual relationship policy and had it approved by the faculty. I had problems, I had to deal with problems with women graduate students and the relationships with their mentors, their advisors and the other faculty. And some of these things were very destructive. This was a new experience for me, that how destructive some of the relationships could be, and the doubts the women students had about themselves after something like this happened. So we were able to get a consensual relationship policy in place, which says that essentially, there cannot be an intimate relationship between a student and a faculty if the faculty member was either an advisor or the student was a student in the class. And that, hopefully, has helped with some of the problems.

So, how did this experience help me? And it was a very good experience for me. I grew certainly in a lot of ways. One being intellectually. Because, intellectually, I learned a lot about different fields. The first time a Ph.D. thesis in music passed my desk, and it all it was was a score. I looked at it and said, what? And that was the thesis. Now, I ended up making them put some words around at least the beginning, but I certainly did think it was a shock to open the page and then find nothing but a music score. So learning about anthropology and the humanities, English and what it means to do field work in anthropology, was really very, very nice, fine arts, so I loved that aspect of it. It_s like a whole new world opening up to me. I also learned, Fran today in the opening session, said that knowledge is power. I had, I learned that words were power. That you can, it_s really important how you express things, and if you want something, it_s very important how you try to convince, and you do this with words. So I think that the words and how you use them are just so important. I sat at so many meetings and I began to see how people, some people knew how to argue their point and how to get what they wanted and they did it with words. And other people had not the foggiest idea, and they could have really good ideas, but if they could not express them and argue them in a coherent way, they were not able to achieve it. And that has made me think about, when I_m in a situation that I want something, how do I go about getting it.

As Jeanne said, I also learned the importance of consensus. That it_s really important to get consensus. It_s very hard and it takes a lot of time, but it_s important. However, there_s a certain point where you have to say, _I_m not going to get consensus._ And then you make the hard decision. So you have to be able to say, _This is my decision. I know everybody_s not going to agree with me, but it_s the decision I have to make._ As Jeanne said, you can_t please everybody, so you shouldn_t try. And that took me awhile to learn, because I think as a female, we try to be, we try to please people. And there_s a certain point where you cannot. And so you don_t worry about it. Now I don_t really care about pleasing people. You can_t be intimidated. That was because, if I said the initial thing with the faculty and having a lot of egomaniacs, or not a lot, some egomaniacs, they would try to intimidate and that_s the way that they do things. And so you had to learn, I had to learn that I couldn_t be intimidated, even though I don_t particularly like to fight in public, I will and I did.

The other thing is I learned I didn_t want to be in administration for the rest of my life. I enjoyed the experience, but I knew that, and that was good experience for me, to realize that what I really wanted to do and what I really enjoy is being a professor, so I enjoy the relationship with the students, which I didn_t have with a dean. I mean, I had some relationships, but not the intimate relationships that you have with your students. Now, I don_t mean sexually intimate, because of our consensual relationship, but I mean the very nice bonding kind of relationship, so I miss that. And so I learned that I do want to be a faculty member and I_ve gone back and I_m very happy to be back. I also learned that you can make a difference. That there are things that you can do and people say you cannot do it. I was told that I would never be able to do the things that I wanted to do. The Provost office told me I would never be able to do the things I wanted to with the increase in the minority representation. And in fact, challenged me by giving me more money than he thought I could use and I ended up doing exactly what he didn_t think I could do. So you can make a difference. You just have know how to do it, or you have to figure out how to do it.

Another lesson is to keep your options open. Because I continued with my research in those five years that I was dean, I was able to step down and just continue to go on with my research as if nothing happened. If I hadn_t done that, and there were a lot of deans, a very good friend of mine, who did not do that, stopped the research and was a dean for seven years, could not really make it back into the research world. And so I think if you have, if you do something like this and you have some qualms about what you want to do, you don_t give up the research and that was said today in one of the panels, too. You continue to do the research. You can always go back and start teaching again. I gave up teaching. You can always go back and teach, but you_re not going to be able to do the research. And so I was always very thankful that something told me not to give that up and so I was able to return and continue with my research.

Okay, so that, I think is our introductory remarks. We can open the floor up for questions. Any questions? Yes.

Q: Inaudible

MLS: Yes. So the question was, what, and I_ll rephrase a little bit. What do I think it was about me that made them call me and ask me if I would apply for the position? I think it was the fact, or a number of things, if I had to say, certainly the fact that I had been successful in my field, and so I_d gone through the ranks and I was known as somebody who was successful. I had also been somewhat vocal in the University for certain things. Today in one of the panels, people were talking about whether we have to be safe, our actions we want to be safe, and I don_t think that_s true. I mean, I was very vocal in things that I disapproved of and so people in the University, a number of them knew me and knew that I would speak out for things that I didn_t think were right. Sometimes it was wrong, but sometimes I got what I wanted. So I think it was that. I was also known as a good mentor for graduate students because of my students and the graduate program was really about students and so they knew I cared about graduate students and so, in fact, they told me that the graduates student organization had mentioned my name as somebody.

Q: Inaudible

TL: So the question was, when I first came to *Darpa*, how was it I was able to formulate a vision that was broader than my own personal research agenda had been prior to that? It was a very difficult thing. I don_t know if I would have been able to do it quite as well if it hadn_t been for a few people there, one in particular, Dwayne Adams who was at *Darpa* at the time, who is now at CMU, was very, very helpful to me. He was the deputy director there. He happened to be a very strong computer science advocate, which is not usual for someone in that position and he also knew something about computer security and had just a personal interest in it, so I was able to interact with him frequently and he would constantly challenge me with things I hadn_t thought of prior to that. There are also, as a program manager, you have access to their entire brains of the research community. People are very happy to help you figure out what you should be funding in the future, and so I relied on that quite heavily, too. So I talked to a lot of people at the universities and tried to use my own judgment about who was telling me just to keep funding their pet research projects, or who actually was taking a broader, more disinterested view. And so basically over a lot of iterations, was able to do that. And you know, one of the first things I had to do was then present my program plan to the *Darpa* director and all of the office managers at *Darpa*, which can be a very intimidating audience. Because they_re, they almost start off kind of questioning your right to even propose a program, and you have a few opportunities. If you don_t do well the first time, you can come back and answer their questions, and so just through some iterations, it helped a lot that there was a commitment at *Darpa*, particularly from Dwayne that we were going to have a program, so it_s just a matter of getting it right.

Q: I have a question for Jeanne. I guess Mary Lou talked about the power of words, so you must have had the right words, the right arguments to make to get these resources from the dean, is this when you were negotiating ** ? ** have any general tips?

JF: Yes. So I think I came from a good position because in some sense, I didn_t really want the job, so I didn_t have anything to lose. I didn_t have an agenda, you know, my agenda was to get stuff for the department, so if the end he had come back and said, _No, I will not do this,_ I would have said, _Fine, I_m not doing this job,_ so I would have walked, right? So I think that was one thing. I wasn_t invested, it wasn_t really for me, it was for the greater entity. The other thing was, it was pretty tough. It was tough in the sense that this particular dean is a pretty strong dean, and I think he thought at first that maybe I was a cream puff and he was going to have an easy job of it, he would just ask me and I_d say, _Oh sure, Bob, that would be fine. I_ll do that._ And in the course of this, let_s say our relationship developed, we had a pretty, we have a pretty adversarial relationship. We_ve learned to be friendly at it, but in fact I think the structure works better when you can just say, this is a relationship that is going to be, you know we_re really coming at cross purposes. We have different agendas. Mine was for the department and to do the best in terms of where the department was going. His was at a higher level in terms of the whole school and those things conflict.

Q: Inaudible

JF: I think I convinced him that I wasn_t going to do the job unless he gave me most of what I was asking for, is what it really came down to. And you know, he, afterwards said to me, _And I_m never doing this for anyone else again._ So I_m afraid I may have messed it up for other people in the future, but I think basically, I was, you just have to stick to your guns and I think that this is, Mary Lou is also talking about how she negotiated for this extra money. I assume you spent it as well? So I think you, in that instance, I think very clearly we needed these things to survive and that was just it. I mean, I haven_t totally figured out, I think that relationship that I_ve had with the dean has evolved over time and I haven_t totally figured out how to really get everything I want out of him. The best way to do that, and this is always particular to the person that you_re working with, is to study other people and to see how they, you know someone else been successful in doing it. You can quite frankly, talk to other department chairs or other people who are involved about things like that. So that_s one tip.

Q: I have a question for Teresa. So in doing, being a *Darpa* program manager for four years and changing the course of research for a whole area, so by doing that, are you enough involved in the technical details to be able to jump back in to your academic career, because at *Darpa*, you really cannot ** research career, because at *Darpa* you really cannot even spend one day on ** it_s too crazy, right?

TL: Right. So the question is, after spending four years at *Darpa* working on a bigger stage, can a person go back and do research? Well, that_s what I_m doing now. I don_t find it as easy to go back as I thought it was, that I might, but actually, I was involved enough in the technical ideas while I was there. I mean it wasn_t that I completely let go of that and was just working on an administrative level, so I felt like I was keeping up at some level, though not as deep as I would like on every project, with the technical work that was going on in the community. But now that I_m at Xerox, it_s a new set of problems, which I find really stimulating, so it_s, and there_s good people, I have really good people to work with. Part of my responsibility there is a manager. I_m managing a small group of people, about five people, but so, they_ve given me, basically a few months to figure out what it is I want to do, and that_s what I_m winding up those few months now. I_ve got a list of things I could work on and people who want to work on those with me, so we_ll see how that works out. But basically, everyone who goes there, it_s their intent, because it_s a temporary job, it_s their intent to go back and do something, either their previous job or some other job, so you_re always, somewhere in the back of your mind you_re always kind of still engaged with what you_re doing next. So if you ask me in a few more months, I can tell you better how easy it was.

Q: Inaudible

MLS: I really never got a chance to do much with increasing the representation of women, only because I really felt I had to focus and use the money that I had, as well as the energy that the departments had on minorities. And there were a number of programs, one of which is that from the Provost office, I ended up eventually getting about $800,000 worth of fellowship money and this took, gave them out in 200 bits, $200,000 bits pieces, with the understanding that when a department had a, you know, they continue, when I first went in, they told me they could not increase the representation of minorities because there just aren_t any minorities who want to go to graduate school and they_re not qualified. So I came up with a program that I would give them, if they found any qualified minority, I would give that person a fellowship for two years, free of charge to the department. The only condition was that the department had to have a research mentor associated with that person and every year, they had to write me a progress report. And secondly, after the two years was up, they had to take that person, they had to support the person as a TA or whatever. I didn_t want them to use the fellowship for two years and then, and all of a sudden, there were minorities, candidates and it was essentially that that the department started paying attention to it, is what it was, because they saw it as a way of getting more graduate students, which they wanted. And then, so that started. And we also had a visitation. I gave any department that found qualified minority students, I would pay for the minority student to come in to visit the campus. So then that also helped because then they would come and they could talk them and convince them to come to Pitt. We also had support programs for them. I already said about the networking with CMU and also we had networking opportunities within the University, within arts and sciences. So, I mean, I had read reports on this, that the students that don_t finish, if you then give them money and help them, they do finish. So that was basically the program. There were other little things, but that was the main thing, I think. And getting the departments to really start thinking about it and doing it.

Q: Inaudible

MLS: I_m sorry, thank you. The question was, did I feel as the dean, that I had a lot of flexibility in terms of coming up with my own programs, or did I have to essentially, did the Provost put any kind of pressures. I felt I had the flexibility. I mean, I happen to be doing a few things that somebody in his office liked, and that helped, but the consensual relationship was not something that they particularly wanted, because it caused all kind of chaos in the University for awhile, but it_s certainly something that they supported, so I really felt I had the flexibility to do what I wanted. I mean, within reason. Any other questions? Yes.

Q: Something, this is for all three of you actually. I_d sort of like some feedback, about managing and being in your position. Two of you had said that you had to be pulled into it and Teresa said she only liked managing 10 people or fewer and it_s sort of upsetting to me to see why don_t these apparently successful women want these positions, the power that_s there. I_m also, just recently looking into my research to see if women in technology and glass ceilings, and self advocacy and leadership and things like of that nature, and now here, two of you are saying you_re anxious to step down and it_s sort of upsetting for me to see, why you_re going this direction and do you, is it tied, do you think in any way to gender, or male power or male environment?

TL: What I_m seeing here, and it_s not just us, there_s other panelists, too, have brought this up, I think for the most part, the people here are really, really passionate about research and a lot of these jobs you can_t do research, even on a part time basis. So I think that_s, you_re seeing one slice of the population here, that_s probably not representative of women in management across the industry. So I think that_s one reason, but speaking for myself, it_s not that I_m trying to shy away from these jobs, it_s just that when I had 10 direct reports, my time is really spent with people with problems, interpersonal problems, or problems with the company or various things, sitting in my office, I have to work through with them, that it_s just very time consuming. It_s not that I don_t like doing that, or on two occasions I had to fire people and these things are just, you know, emotionally costly and time consuming and so I would not mind having fewer direct reports and being in higher management. I wouldn_t mind that at all. In fact, I do enjoy research management, I think there_s lots of rewards to do that. And I would, I look forward to advancement at Xerox, for my personal future.

JF: I_ll just say something about department chair positions. I think the department chair position can be an unsatisfying position just in and of itself because you have a lot of responsibility and very little power, so I wonder if perhaps the dean_s position, certainly as I view it, you have a lot more power and a lot more ability to make changes, distribute resources, and so forth, so forth. And that_s certainly part of my reluctance.

MLS: I think it_s a very good question, everybody heard the question. I think it_s a very good question. Certainly we do complain about the glass ceiling. And in the University, we_re always complaining about the fact that there aren_t, when I was a dean, there were 16 deans at Pitt at the time and three of which were women. One being in the school of nursing. So we_re always complaining about the lack of women in the upper administration and yet, when these opportunities come out, we don_t take them. And I, in fact, did step down after five years. So why? I don_t think it_s gender related. I frankly think that administration, high level administration position like that, you_re only good for about five years. So I thought that at that time, I had done the kinds of things I wanted to do and I wasn_t as enthusiastic about things any more as I used to be, so I think was time to step down. I really don_t think any administrator should be there more than five years. I think that_s about right for administrators. So I did think that. And maybe this is gender related, what I_m going to say next, I also think that I liked the personal contacts with students much more than I had as a dean. That_s what I like to do. So maybe it is gender related that we would rather have the more intimate personal relationships with students then is possible at the dean_s level, although you certainly can make an impact. But you don_t have that kind of nurturing, mentoring that you have as a faculty member. And maybe that is gender related. Any other questions?

I have a question. How many of you are thinking of going into administration of any kind? Okay. As department chairs or higher ups? Okay, so that was the question I was going to ask the panel if no one else asked the question, I had a question planned which is, and I_ll ask them. And this is related to this. How do you go about preparing yourself for this kind of position? Obviously, the three of us I don_t think, prepared ourselves. At least I_ll speak for myself. I had no preparation, it just happened. But now that we_re trying to get women to think about this, and trying to get women to look forward to administrative positions, how do you go about preparing yourself?

JF: I think one thing is the part of the academic job that is a research manager is a good preparation because you do start thinking about, at least, welfare of other people and how to, you know, nurture your students and so forth, so forth, those are, it_s a smaller scale, but the same sort of thoughts. One thing that really helped me is to go to the Snowbird conference that_s run for department chairs. I became department chair like July 1, and immediately went to Snowbird in early July and it_s, so talking to people who are doing this and learning how, what are methods that they use for doing this and that. I mean, many of the, I_ll speak for department chair level, department chairs have the same kinds of problems, the mechanics at different institutions may differ, but so dealing with certain issues. People have been doing this, and so talking to how people have solved these problems and what the alternatives are. I mean, I even hear this also from my dean, who says, _Well, my dean colleague at so-and-so tells me that departments should have blah blah blah size._ So you know, they all do it. They_re doing it to. So I think that_s, talking to people who do it is as good a way as any to start.

TL: I_d like to echo that. I think if you_re fortunate enough to have a good manager, you can learn a lot from watching that person and volunteering to take on some of their duties. That will certainly give you a way to evaluate whether you enjoy doing that, or your ability of doing that and getting some feedback on what you_re doing before you_re actually on the hook to deliver on that job. And I think in most places, there are opportunities to do management on a small scale, like project leader, for example, or being the principle investigator, perhaps, on some project. So those are ways to get in, and then depending on the organization, you may have to work on getting some recognition for yourself within your company or your organization. Because in some places, some companies, the way to advancement is through upper management knowing who you are and that you_re doing a great job. That_s not true everywhere, but like at SRI, for example, it_s basically, are you doing a great job of attracting research dollars, and if so, I mean, nobody has to know who you are, you will advance. So I think there_s ways you can kind of try things on, and this, it really depends on who your manager is, how much they_re willing to help you do that.

MLS: So I think both Teresa and Jeanne talked about observing, and I found this, too. As graduate dean, I went to so many meetings, it was really painful to go to meetings, and so many of them, but I think you can learn from meetings. And I used to start doing this observing people and how they got what they wanted. Just kind of sit back and say, I_m not really concerned about the issue, perhaps, but just how are people arguing? How are they making their point? And you can learn a lot from the people that do it well and you can learn a lot from the people that don_t do it well. And so I think that_s good training. It_s good training for life, in terms of trying to argue your point. And as well as having role models. Who are good administrators, and who are not. And the good ones are the ones you pay attention to. But I think even just thinking about administration is a step in the right, is preparing yourself. There was an NSF study that was done that said, about graduate students, that the majority of students who go to graduate school thought about going to graduate school when they were sophomores. And if they didn_t think about it by then, it was probably too late by the time they became seniors. And I think this is the same thing. You know, you think about it and you will start preparing then. Any other questions, concerns?

Okay, well I hope you join me in thanking both Teresa and Jeanne for their **.