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.


Strategies for Success
5/2 11:00 _ 12:30

Joann Ordille: My name is Joann Ordille and I_m the moderator for this panel discussion on Strategies for Success in industrial national research laboratories. The first thing I_d like to do is introduce our panelists. There are two orders here, there_s the one on the slide, and then there_s the order that people are sitting at the table. We decided to follow the table order.

First I_d like to introduce you to Dona Crawford, who is the Director of the Advance Product Realization Program, and the Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative Program at Sandia National Laboratories. Dona is responsible for focusing many of SNL_s research and development activities, especially those relating to high performance computing and information technologies. In order to reduce the time and cost of the weapons life cycle including design assessment, manufactured, deployment and retirement. Dona started her career at Sandia in 1976 as a numerical analyst and has held several staff and management positions dealing with computing and information infrastructure, hardware servers, operating systems, visual comprehension, software environment and engineering applications. She holds a bachelor_s degree in mathematics from Redlands University and a Master_s degree in Operations Research from Stanford. Dona is a member of the ACM, the IEEE, active in the conference on high performance computing and communications and was one of the founders of the info-test that is the national information infrastructure test bed. She serves on several advisory committees for the national science foundation and the national research council and participates in many community activities.

Rosemary Chang is currently as SGI, and has a Bachelor_s Master_s and Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics, receiving her Ph.D. from Brown University. Her area of specialty is computer aided geometric design. After her Ph.D. she went to Sandia National Lab, so we have the advantage of having someone who has been in both kinds of laboratories on our panel, and she was there for six years. Then she did was is contemporary and very popular thing, she joined a start-up company and we may be able to ask her why she stayed there for a couple of months before joining Control Data Corporation where she managed a software group. After two and a half years at Control Data, she returned to California where she joined a small company called Silicon Graphics, and she_s been there ever since, which amounts to about 12 years. She_s on the board of the Society of Industrial and Applied Math, SIAM, also on the Board of Governors and the current chair for the Institute for Mathematics and it_s Applications at the University of Minnesota, and was the previous chair for the SIAM activity group in geometric design.

Next, Laura Haas is a research staff member and manager at IBM_s Almaden research center. Laura joined IBM in 1981 to work on the R-Star, distributed relational database management project and subsequently managed the star burst extensible query processing work which forms the basis of the DP2 *** Query Processor. Laura then headed the exploratory database systems department in Almaden for three and a half years. She returned to project management to start the garlic* project on *** middle ware systems. She was the Vice-Chair of the *** Sigmon from 1989 to 1997. She served as the associate editor of the ACM Journal of Transactions on Database Systems and as the program chair of the 1998 ACM Sigmon Technical Conference. She received IBM_s awards for Outstanding Technical Achievement and Outstanding Contributions and a YWCA Tribute to Women in Industry.

And I, Joann Ordille, am a former panelist where the normal person on the panel. I am not a manager but a member of technical staff having received my Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin in 1993. Then I joined AT&T Bell Laboratories and remained in Bell Laboratories as it became Lucent Technologies. My research focus is creating the network infrastructure for global communication systems, and it sort of joins up with some of the middle ware work that Laura has done. So I_ve worked in areas of fast scalable search engines for the internet, directory enabled networking technologies, data integration technologies, and architectures for secure auto configuring multi-media networks. I am on the Computing and Research Association Committee of Women in Computer Science and Engineering, the committee that sponsored this workshop. I am a member of the ACM form and the ITF.

So we have a brief outline for our discussion today. This is it. Each of us is going to talk briefly about why we think of ourselves as successful. What have been the trade-offs for us between personal goals and organizational goals? How have we aligned our personal goals for career growth and success in life with the goals of our organizations? And then what kinds of things did we need, or do we continue to need to be successful? So what personal and organizational resources have we found really instrumental in success? Personal resources are things you can often control. You can manage your own personal management and growth. Organizational resources may be a more difficult task and may require astute job selection. Lastly, one of the panelists very early on mentioned that we are in a very dynamic and shifting model in the National and Industrial Research Labs, and so we thought we would spend some time talking about how to manage change.

I was voted first in our discussion earlier in the week. The first question gave me a lot of pause. Why am I successful? And I decided that I feel successful because I am in fact doing exactly what I always wanted to do. Some of those things that I always wanted to do are very simple things that I get as benefits from my job, that I might get from other jobs. One example is, when I was a very small child, I had a relatively who traveled around and brought me back little gifts from different locations and sent me postcards and I decided that when I got to be an adult it would be great to travel around. That was one of my goals. And my job has given me the opportunity to travel all around the world. I_m a speaker on the *Bell Lab Seminar Tour. The *Bell Lab Seminar Tour is a project of Bell Laboratories to go to all the different countries in which Lucent does business and to talk about what the future of technology will be. I give talks on the future of the internet and data networking and I really enjoy it. In addition to that, most researchers also travel around the world to either collaborate with others or participate in conferences. So that is sort of an inherent feature of the job. Besides that sort of childhood wish fulfillment, I also have for the longest time wanted to solve problems and to do that in collaboration with others. So the picture in my mind was always that I_d be standing at this blackboard and solving some problem with another person. And recently I realized that yes, I do that all the time now. It_s sort of a basic part of my life to have that kind of collaboration, so that_s also the fulfillment of one of my goals. Another basic goal that I_ve had for a long time, and that has developed and refined over the years is to do really good and exciting new work, and to see that work become a reality for a number of people. I feel that in the industrial research lab setting, my opportunity to do that involves taking my ideas and moving them into products, and so that idea has been more of a challenge to bring into reality because the skills that you need in order to do technology transfer successfully in a research lab are additional skills beyond the ones you necessarily learn in graduate school. However, I feel that I_ve made great progress in that area, and you may in fact see some products from Lucent that have had my direct input.

In saying all this, and saying that I have exactly what I want and I_m really enjoying my job, is not to say that there have been no problems, that there are no difficulties. For example, it might be the case that I might disagree with my management, and that would be a problem to work out and that certainly has a ***. It might be the case that sometimes I_m asked to do something that isn_t on the top of my list, that it_s not necessarily the first thing in my priority list to do. However, in the whole of my life, there are so many things that I have that I have always wanted to have that were my goals, that the reduction of any one goal for a short period of time really doesn_t decrease my feeling of success. In addition to working in computer science research, I also bicycle long-distances, I scuba-dive, I garden and all those things add to my feeling of success.
What does one need to be successful? I think that I wasn_t always successful. One of the critical things that happened for me was I decided to be successful. Once you decide that you want to be successful and that you_re going to live in an attitude of being successful, then what you do is you look at things as either resources to contribute to your success, opportunities to enhance your success, or problems to be resolved. But nothing is really a permanent impediment. A couple of things I learned along the way that have been really crucial is it_s important to communicate what you want. And I said this in the networking section the other day. If people do not know what your goals are and what kinds of things you need to achieve those goals, then it will be harder for you to achieve them. The other thing I learned is that if you work towards everyone_s success, acknowledging that people have different goals, you_re more likely to be successful. One of the challenges in technology transfer as I said is that a business unit in Lucent, for example, will have a set of goals, and those goals will involve producing products in certain time frames and making certain amounts of money in them. And in order to analyze whether a certain project will contribute to that goal, you need to do a business case, you need to do projections for the income from the product for a period of time and that process is a lot different than creating the newest most excellent fastest most exciting thing you can think of. There are cost trade-offs and time trade-offs, so it_s important to be flexible and to realize that only if everyone is reaching their goals will this particular technology transfer be successful. I found that people respect you more if you acknowledge their goals and are helping them towards their goals, and they_re more likely to cooperate in helping you towards your goals.

Lastly, I had a few things I wanted to say about change. My ideas come from this experience that we all had in AT&T Bell Laboratories a few years ago. That is, when people joined AT&T Bell Laboratories, it being an organization of mythic proportions and long history, they never dreamed that it might change substantially in their mist. So it was a great shock to all of us when AT&T decided to divide the company into three parts, AT&T, Lucent Technologies and NDR, and to divide the laboratory between AT&T and Lucent. My particular research center was divided two-thirds between AT&T and Lucent Technologies. This seems like a really extreme thing, and this week I_ve been talking to a bunch of people about this, and I think that it_s not as uncommon as I thought. Because there are mergers and acquisitions these days and people_s lives can suddenly change. And companies are under a lot of competitive stress, so their goals might change, or the organization might be re-organized. In this process I learned a few things. One was that, especially on this scale, the division of the company and of research created an enormous amount of confusion and grief at first. So individuals suffered through that themselves, but even if you had come to grips with the change, the people around you were still suffering from the change. And it brought with it a lot of opportunities to do things differently. So once you got through your sorrow at the loss, the opportunities were presented to you. This encouraged a lot of different kinds of activities. Some people started jockeying for managerial positions in one of the new companies. A lot of people would come by to lobby you to join this organization or that organization, to try to persuade you to what organization you wanted to participate in. What was needed in this environment of change, was to be very clear on your personal goals. And in the by and by you came to realize that some people were making decisions based on what_s best categorized as old business. Some one experience they had had in Bell Laboratories during their careers, maybe they had once working in switching and access, the manufacturing part of the company, and they really didn_t like it, so they decided to go with AT&T, the service side of the company. Maybe the person that worked next to them had had the opposite experience and made the decision based on that. That wasn_t necessarily the best way to make these decisions because the evaluation one needed to do was what is probably going to be the direction of the two companies. What are my personal strengths and goals and which one fits me better. That was very important. The other thing I learned from this was that there is a difference between your personal career goals and your organizational goals, and you always have to keep in touch with your personal goals because your organization may change it_s goals suddenly, it may completely change in your mitts, and in those circumstances if you_re only validation for your work is coming from your organization, then the loss will be even more profound. But if your validation for your work and your career is coming because you_re reaching your own goals and you_re still in a position to do that, than this kind of change is just one of those problems to be handled, and not something that is impossible to get through.

I_ll hand the mic over to the next speaker.

Dona Crawford: I_m going to stay right here and talk, and I_ll take a slightly different tact rather than answering the questions directly I_ll just sort of describe what it is I do and why I think that is success and my definition of success and then talk a little bit about change. As Joann said, I_m the Director of Advance Product Realization Program, and that_s kind of a mouthful. It doesn_t sound like it has a whole lot to do with computing, so let me tell you what that is. I do not do technical work now, and I do not manage people now in the direct sense, where I make sure they have their safety training and their security training and their performance reviews and so on. But I manage program, and or I manage dollars. This means that I have to have an idea for what strategic idea, what direction the company needs to go. I have to figure out what the justification for that program might be and I have to sell that. The skills required to do that are sort of seeing the big picture and knowing how these pieces can fit together, and communication skills. I did this within the Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative, or the ASCI program which many of you may know about. Someone said yesterday, think of what the program might look like or the situation might look like if you were not there. The ASCI program would certainly been there had I not been here, but the ASCI program would be different as a whole, and it certainly would be different at my laboratory in terms of who was working on what particular technologies. That is my contribution to the ASCI program. Beyond that what I_ve done at my laboratory is we had a division, computing has always been really important and necessary, but it_s been primarily a research endeavor that has not been connected to the main mission of our laboratory. Now I am at a DOE, Defense Programs Laboratory, and our business is to stock pile, making sure that it_s safe, reliable and secure. I_m not a war monger. To me I work there because I want to make sure that there_s a firm deterrent for a world war in the future. So taking the computing technologies that we_ve been developing at the very highest end, and we are really pushing the state of the art in the computing technologies in ASCI, and using those technologies to make our product differently, or to assure the security and safety of the stock pile is what the Advance Product Realization Program is. There was a *** in our laboratory between the computing research side of the house and applying that to the weapons side of the house, and my job was to take that and apply that, so that is what I_m doing now. It_s called the Revolution of Engineering and Manufacturing, and so I_m the program leader for that. I also then manage these programs. Not only did I help create them, I also manage them, which means you need to do planning and develop milestones and track milestones and make some hard decisions about changing the priorities within the program, whether it_s being successful or not. Is that success? I honestly would just give a statistic, which it_s kind of a hard fact and it_s not bragging rights, but in terms of rank and salary, I_m probably at the top one percent of my company, and what I want to say about that is that only one percent of the people make the top one percent of the company. Another way to say that is, _be careful what you want and what you_re asking for._ A lot of people say that_s great, wonderful, and other people say I wouldn_t want it. We heard earlier about normal happy people versus management. Well since I_m on the management side I have to say it requires both. You need to know what it is that is comfortable for you. We need people to do management. We need people to develop programs. We need people to manage people. We need people to do technical work. And it_s the totality of those activities that make each company successful in whatever, whether they are making product or whether they_re assuring the safety of a stock pile. But you do need to know what you_re getting into and sometimes it appears that a person in a different person is not working as hard as you are, so if you_re doing technical work and you_re working long hours to put out a new product or to develop a new algorithm or to make the computer run or writing a proposal, you may think you_re working harder than someone who just goes and sits in meetings all day. Well someone who goes and sits in meetings all day may think that they are working harder because those meeting might be in 50 states in 50 weeks and certainly I travel every week, and I have offices in three states, and it_s a very different job from what you might imagine. I_m just here to say that I_m not justifying anything, they are all important and they are all necessary.

So what is my definition of success? You can judge for yourself whether that_s success or not, and I want to say that it has changed over time. Success early on was getting that good job and I was delighted and being sent back to school. I actually have a non-technical master_s degree, and I was sent back to school to get a technical master_s degree. Success then became writing a code that didn_t have any bugs in it. Success then became helping my group and my project succeed, and later on helping my program succeed and helping others succeed, so the definition changes over time. My definition is wanting what you can achieve and achieving what you want. The resources that I think I needed to be successful and to achieve what I wanted and to want what I could achieve, were primarily, not compare myself with other people, but to compare myself with myself and to continue improving, and just always try to better yourself in some way. Because you always develop personal growth and strength in doing that. The other thing I would say is to know when to compete and when to be complimentary. Often times being complimentary is a way of competing and it_s a way of achieving your own personal success. Joann even said helping solve problems. Looking back to when I was younger, the things that I wanted to do was to help others. By going into management, I have been able to help others to be successful, therefore I define my own success. I also wanted to travel, and I certainly do that, maybe too much now. I grew up in a very poor family and I wanted a comfortable standard of living. I never expected to be rich, I_m not rich by any means, but I have a very comfortable standard of living. Going into a national laboratory setting *** for that. But most of all in importance was my family and having a way to have a family, children, husband, was the most important of all, and I have that. Trying to go through my notes in some sort of chronicle *** order here.

About change, the one thing I wanted to say, I have already said, is that your definition of success with change. The definition of your organizations success will change, and the technology will change. While there are some *step functions drastic changes that might occur, primarily change is what we live in everyday. So the strengths and the skills and the resources that you bring to your personal life and to your professional life are what help you take care of change. So again, I repeat those. Knowing where to compete and knowing where to be complimentary, knowing what your strengths are and building on those, but one that I would add is focus. What is it that you really want to do and do that. Because you_re usually good at what you like to do, and you like to do what you_re good at, so that kind of focus allows you to deal with change when the world could be turmoil around you and you can keep your center of gravity about you.

I think those are the primary things I wanted to say. I would also add to this group, because I_m probably one of the older ones in the crowd, that to me, I grew up in an era where women could be super women, they could do it all, and I firmly believed that and I tried that and I did the best I could, and I think I_ve been a jack of all trades, a master of none. And I think the next challenge to the next generation is that you maybe don_t assimilate quite so much as some of the first of us had to make it, but that you be yourself, back to the focus, and know yourself and be yourself.

Now, I want to do one more thing, which is not quite with this panel, but the previous panel gave me this idea on getting funding. There are many of us senior in our companies, who would be delighted to talk to you or offer you jobs or talk to you about jobs and there were, I mentioned the ASCI program, we_re certainly hiring within the DOE, the Defense Program Laboratories, I don_t want to make a big ad, but if you_re interested at all, it_s state of the art technology, it_s really exciting, pushing the frontiers work, and so I just want to say look in your roster of who attended, but aside from that I_m going to put up my e-mail address and say if you want to contact me you can, about any topic. (stepped away from microphone_ inaudible)

Rosemary Chang: My name is Rosemary Chang and I work for SGI and I_ve been there for 12 years, as Joann has introduced me. The thought of success, when I asked myself last night am I successful, the answer came very quickly, yes. But the reasons why came a little slower. First I_ll describe my journey to where I am today. I spent five or six years at Sandia Laboratories, Dona and I worked together in the same group for a while. I spend nine months in a small start up, then I decided I wanted to go to a larger company and I went to Control Data because I had never been to Minnesota and they said come out for a visit and I said _yes_ and I ended up taking the job. Then I went to a small company at the time, Silicon Graphics because I wanted to come back to California. Now in all of these changes, I_ve made small decisions, and looking back these decisions actually steered me in a direction. And so, you might be hearing about, *** said goals. I have goals, but they are very amorphous and they are out there. I know what my goals are looking back because they have been these small little decisions that I_ve made. Now I am successful because I am doing what I want to do and how. I have programmed, I have designed algorithms, I_ve managed project, I_ve managed people. I was an internal consultant. What I am now is I_m independent. No one really manages me and I don_t manage people. To me that is heaven. But it_s also very difficult because I have to set my own short term goals, I have to find my own projects. I have to evaluate myself, which is very difficult because I know what I_m capable of and I know what I_ve done, that_s also very difficult. But the job I have today is wonderful. I get to talk to a lot of smart people inside the company and outside the company, and that is very special to me. Because I can work in SIAM, I can do a lot of external talks, I meet a lot of students. I decided a couple of years ago that I wanted to recruit. So I have been doing that for a couple of years. So all of this is by choice, and that to me is what makes me happy in the job. If I_m happy in the job, I_m successful. I have choice to what I_m doing. I think one key that I_d like to give out to you is the kind of attitude that you have. We_ve been hearing about change and our response to change, and I believe that you have to have a good attitude for yourself and to show others that things may be bleak, but if you believe that you can get through it and you show that attitude, that_s very important. It helps yourself and it helps people around you.

Now, for the important resource, there_s a single resource that I believe helped me. I really couldn_t come up with one, so what I did was I combined two. What has been very good for me is that I_ve been in the information channel. Information is what drives SGI, and information is not often formally there. Information at SGI, and probably a lot of other companies, is that there are informal channels in which information exists. Now, I believe that if I_m sitting in my office and I need some information that is vital for my job, I can sit in my office and maybe someone will come by or there_s information on an internal news group or web page that will give me that information, but I can_t wait. So I_m part of the information train and I know where to find that information, I know who to find. What has helped me become part of this information chain, inside the company and outside the company, my own technical area, is and this has been nurtured through my good communication skills, and networking, and so the reason for you to hone these skills is to be able to communicate your needs, what you believe are the things necessary to make your organization successful, if you_re able to communicate that, get the information you need quickly. This also is supported by having a good network. You know who to call within your company in different functions and areas, just not in engineering is very important.

Dealing with change, that is also very difficult for me to describe, until I realized that there are at least three different kinds of change. This actually came to me early this morning, and I_m going to describe this more in terms of control. I_m going to talk about the things you can control the most. The change in yourself is something that you control, and actually you should be doing this. That the degree you earned is just the beginning. You have to be continuously learning. You have to support your own technical expertise. You have to be continuously adapting. As Joann mentioned, you have to know the goals of your organization. You need to know how you_re going to be evaluated and why you_ve been evaluated the way you have been. Actually I have seen myself change over the 20 plus years I_ve been working, and this is a good change, and something you should be steering and it should be by your choice. So that_s a good change, a change that is completely under your control. Now the second kind of change is the change that you instigate in your environment. I_ve come to the point in my life where if I see something that needs to be fixed or addressed, I immediately do something about it. Now in a smaller organization that SGI was once, it was much easier to do because there were fewer people you had to talk to. Now that we_re about 9,000 _ 10,000 people, it_s a little harder, and you have to do it within a structure. So I_ve learned how to do that. I_m continuously doing this. And as I mentioned earlier that I recruit. I actually recruit at Brown University, I go back twice a year, I introduce students, and when I come back I have a number of students I_m championing through the organization. Now, although I_m on tape, I really hate to acknowledge this, but I think I have to because it_s a good learning point. SGI doesn_t always have the infrastructure necessary for a small company or a large company with some small company characteristics. One thing that I_ve seen a couple of years ago, that we needed to have a better recruitment process. If the infrastructure was there I_d be quite satisfied to come back with my report on students, put it into a system and know that that right students will get to the right organizations, they_ll be interviewed, perhaps made an offer and they_ll start working. We don_t have that right now, so I have to do all phases of this. But as I_m doing this, I_m trying to build the infrastructure. So that_s a good example of change that is under your control, that you instigated and supported. So that_s a good kind of change. Now the third kind of change is the one that we usually think about, and that_s the change that comes independent of what we do. Business, there_s a down turn in business or a new technology starts up that your company was caught off guard. Management changes, your really good manager decides to leave the company or leave your group. A lot of changes that are not under our control, that we have not instigated, we have not welcomed, and it comes as a surprise. Well, changes happen. What I would advise you to do is try to minimize the surprise effect using a network. There are a lot of changes that I_ve seen at SGI that I knew were coming. I talked to people, I knew they were coming. So I was able to prepare myself. Another thing that has helped me deal with change is I_m always thinking about my next job. What if, what would I do? So, I have a contingency plan. That gives me a lot of flexibility, a lot of power, a lot of choice. So when the changes come, I may be surprised, I_m never shocked, because changes do happen, good changes, bad changes, but I_m always prepared.

I have a few more tips on how to approach change, you have to continuously update your value to the corporation. If you are in an area that has perhaps has been worked on and it is no longer a vital interest of your company, then you need to change to another theme or another specialty, and also know how this is valued by your corporation. There may come a time when it_s no longer valued, so what you do is you go to your list of this is what I want to do next, and go foresee that.

That_s my story, and later on I_ll welcome any questions you might have.

Laura Haas: You_ve heard three definitions of success and I_m going to give you another one. Success is a very personal thing and this is what success means to me. First of all I have to be able to respect myself, and for me personally that means I have to feel that I_m doing quality research, that I_m working on things that are important, not just to me but to the world in my case. I have to basically think that there_s a reason for getting out of bed in the morning. Secondly, it_s very important for me to have the respect of others around me. That means both in my company and outside my company. That is just something very personal, I need to know that people like what I_m doing that they think I_m doing good work. Another very important thing to me to feel successful is to have a certain degree of freedom of action. You may say she works for a big company, she works for IBM, what does this mean, why isn_t she running her own business. Well, a certain degree. I want a certain amount of responsibility and I want to know that within this big organization with its own goals and so on. I am charting my own course, but I_m not taking orders from somebody. There are other people who are perfectly happy, and at a certain point in my career I was definitely very happy, following direction and doing what other_s said and playing an important role and accomplishing some tightly bound mission. But at this point in my life I really need more sense of responsibility for both myself and my organization. Then very important to me is to have a balanced life. I didn_t want to be just a computer scientist, that was not my goal when I was growing up and unlike a couple of the other people on the panel, in my goal, I never liked to travel, I traveled a lot as a kid, so one of my goals was to have all this wonderful stuff up above and still not have to travel too much. So, I_m at a slightly different point in the world.

So why do I think I_m successful, why do I have the nerve to stand here and tell you all that I am a success? Well, partly it_s just state of mind. Basically I_m happy. I like what I_m doing. I get up in the morning and I go to work and I_m really pleased with what I_m doing there. I don_t think that can be overestimated as a measure of how successful you are. Whatever your friends may be doing. I have friends who are CEO_s of companies, I have a friend who became the legal department of E-Bay just before it went public and he_s now worth $30 million over night, fine. That wasn_t my standard of success. I am happier than he is, I think. I_ve achieved some goals that I_ve set for myself that I consider important ones. I_m established, people know my name inside and outside IBM, and I see for myself an exciting future, I think that_s important in terms of state of mind in considering yourself successful. Then there_s the state of being, what am I really? As Joann said I_m a first line manager at IBM Almaden Research Center, that means I am responsible for the technical direction of my projects. I am also fortunate enough to play a role as a key technologist if you will, in other words I_m responsible for an important technical part, I actually write code still and do all sorts of stuff like that, and also a mentor and coach for my people, which is something that is important to me, it_s something I enjoy doing. I am internally respected in IBM. I occasionally get labeled with this visionary term, and I_ll say a little bit more about why that comes about later, but it has to do with my preference for doing exploratory sort of research, research that isn_t necessarily seen by the company as being valuable today, but they can definitely see that it is valuable tomorrow. And Joann mentioned earlier the importance of aligning your goals with the company_s. I have taken a path in choosing to direct my own work and my own future to a certain extent. I have had to make some choices at times, that don_t always agree with the near term goals of the company. But I have always been careful that my longer term goals and the kinds of work I choose to do align very well with what the company is trying to do, otherwise you don_t get that internal respect. So it would not have been possible for me to achieve that goal without really being well aligned with what IBM is trying to do. I_m also seen as both a technical resource, you know I get consulted by product divisions, by other groups in the laboratory, and the managerial resource. I_m often called in when they want to restructure something_. In a more global sense when they_re trying to, lately I_ve been asked to help them restructure the relationships between two divisions, my division, research division, and another division in IBM. That goes to the internal respect. I_m externally very visible, I have a nice long publication record in top conferences and journals. I fulfilled a number of professional roles which Joann rattled off for you. I get invitations to speak at universities and other places actually all over the world, and on some occasions it_s really very nice to get to travel. I got to go to Australia this year to talk to a *DP2 users group about the future of database technology and that was really cool, I had never been to Australia. It_s not true that I really hate to travel. I am married and I have two sons, and my husband will tell you I have way too many hobbies, there are just many too many things I get into, and I have to go through all of them. But I definitely consider myself a well rounded person.

So what are the key things that have made me a success? There_s sort of two things to talk about here. One is just the path that I went through, which again you heard a little bit in my bio. I started as a research staff member, and actually today I am a research staff member and I have always been a research staff member. IBM has an even flatter system than Bell Labs. We don_t even have distinguished research staff members, we just have research staff members. And you have to manage your bit which goes on and off if you want to. I have turned mine on and on and off. I was involved early on in project management. The project that sort of got handed to me that I was asked to do and I made a success of that and I got to be a second line manager, it_s what we call a department head, it_s a little different again than the Bell Labs sort of model. A project manager is really trying to direct a team to do a particular task. Much more like a product development lab, except the kinds of things we_re trying to do are typically further out, or we hope they_re further out. Where a department head is managing several projects, and so all of a sudden *** department is 16 people at the moment. The department I managed with about 25 at the time, well I built it from about 13 to 25. Then I decided somewhere in that process, and this just goes to what Rosemary was saying about not always knowing at the beginning what your goals are and what_s going to make you happy and successful and fulfilled. I was following a very traditional path for success as others might define it, but somewhere in this process I realized that I wasn_t really very happy. I thought I was doing good things, the company loved me, I was told that they were going to be replacing my boss soon and I could head Computer Sciences at Almaden if I wanted to, and I suddenly went no, this is not what_s going to make me happy, this is not going to be success for me. It_s going to be the end of my balanced life because that job you traveled all the time. I have to get off, I_m going to stop the world everybody. I took a sabbatical, and that took some doing, it_s not a very established program at IBM, though they have it, and I went to the University of Wisconsin for a year, and I basically apprenticed myself to one of the senior researchers in my field. And I said I want to pretend to learn, I want to pretend I_m a graduate student, I want to learn to do research again. I_ve lost that touch. I came back from that and this time, after a few months of seeing the way the world laid then and how things were, I was able to define for myself a project, a research agenda, form a group around myself, and really ever since I have been very happy and I would consider myself very successful because I actually came to a point in my life where I knew what I wanted to do and I was doing that, and that_s the key thing. But the characteristics that got me through this path, that gave me the opportunities to find out who I was and really what I wanted to do, the key one I think is caring. I care about my work and I care about the people around me and everybody knows that, it_s very obvious. And I think that makes a big difference, that_s what got me promoted right. Well, Laura cares about all these aspects and she knows all this stuff and she_ll do good quality work because she cares so lets put her in charge of this. The other two things I listed here sort of fall out from the caring. Doing quality work and then communication. And I mean both communication skills which are very important, but really I_m talking more about communication in the sense of what I call subliminal advertising. I don_t go out to toot my own horn, but I_m very good at talking to people and communicating what I do. I tend to do that routinely without even thinking about it. Certainly originally in my career I didn_t think about it much, and I don_t do it to brag, but I go in and I_m consulting somebody about a problem, I may as well tell them how I got to this point that I have this problem, that_s telling them about my accomplishments. Well, that person will be in a meeting sometime and they_ll know that I did this, so it_s a way of letting people know what you have accomplished that gives you these opportunities that does not have to be offense, in fact that_s why I say subliminal. They should never know that you_re bragging about yourself, but letting other people know what you_re doing is really critical for being recognized for what you do.

Then the last thing we agreed to talk about was success and change. As everybody else said, change is the rule. Rule number one is don_t fight it. The people who are least successful in times of change are the ones who resist the change. Some change shouldn_t be happening and that_s a different story, but if the change is going to happen, don_t be the one who_s standing there dragging their heels and being carried along. Instead you want to recognize it. I always think of change as a wave. You want to see the wave forming, you do not want to see it when it_s about to crash on your head. Rosemary pointed that out very well. Then take a role in the change. If you can take a definitive and determining role. If you can_t, at least do what you can in there. And follow your heart and your instincts through the change. Again, Rosemary made the point very nicely, you have to be true to yourself and your goals and that_s the thing to hold on to when everything else around you is changing.

I_m just going to talk briefly about two changes that I_ve dealt with. One is what I call sort of a local change, and this is the kind that Rosemary said you see something wrong in your establishment and your environment and you go out and try and change it. The reason I got the second line manager job was because I was unhappy, and so was everybody around me. It got to the point where I said to myself one day I_m either going to leave IBM right now, or I_m going to fix the situation that we_re in, and I decided, the kind of person I was, there were all these unhappy people around me, if I can do something that can make all of us happier, that_s better than just walking out of the situation. I kind of walked in and said I think we have to fix this, this, and this and they said _Fine, you_ve got the job._ So I was the change agent in that scenario, and believe me it_s a better place to be. I was distinctly happier through this set of changes than the people who were sitting there underneath me basically. I got a lot of support from the department, I was doing good things for the department, but I have to tell you the change agent is not loved even when they are doing good, and even when most people would tell you you_re doing good. You are still the evil person and anybody who wants to go take a look at my website, you_ll see what my department thought of me in this time period. I have my picture up there. I had to do all these evil things. I had to stop projects, I had to appoint some new managers and even when the new managers are great people and they were technically sound, it was change and nobody wanted a new manager. The old guy was bad but at least he was a known commodity. I had to go to people from group to group and in one or two cases out of the department. They just weren_t up to the quality of the department that I was trying to create. That was not fun, that was not a pleasant thing to do, but it was necessary, I felt, for the morale of the rest of the group. Then I started new traditions. Whatever they call those things that aren_t supposed to be able to exist, but they became traditions over time, I just felt that the department needed a culture. It didn_t have a heart and a soul and I wanted to give it one. Well nobody likes new ways of doing things and it wasn_t really a pleasant thing. Needless to say, if you_re not really liked at work, even if you_re very sure that what you_re doing is important and so on, it_s not that much fun, it_s not that good. I think I was a very successful change agent, I did a fine job at this job and the company was very grateful and the people in the department were very grateful, and they_ve kept all these traditions and all the rest of it, but it_s not necessarily pleasant. I still think I was happier than the people who were going through it and had less control. I tried to help them go through it by giving them more control, by helping, involve them, but that was sort of a new tradition. So, even involving them in determining their own fate was a new thing for them. The other kind of change I_ve gone through is a much more global change, though not quite as bad as the breaking up of AT&T. IBM in the time that I have worked there has gone from boom to bust to boom company wise. Along those same lines, we went from a very centralized company, all the decisions were made in one point and everybody must work together along certain lines to a very decentralized, looked like we were going to break ourselves up, we were really headed down that path, to that_s the wrong direction, pull it all back in centralized company again. Each of these fluctuations which you may get, had quite a bit of impact even on local situations. In the research lab in particular, we saw at the same time us swing from exploratory to very applied to very exploratory work again, although not as exploratory as in the 1980_s when we first started this. In the course of all this, the pair of changes from exploratory to applied, came just about that time when I was coming back from my sabbatical leave and starting a new project and choosing to determine my own fate, and what I did in that case was again, to try to take control. I made a conscience decision that what I wanted to do was carry the torch for exploratory research. Wasn_t what the company was saying we should be doing right then, they were saying applied research, we have to save the products, we have to save IBM, got to make the change. But I felt very strongly that the research goals were not changing, that we were still saying that we wanted to be not just vital to the company but famous for our ***. I felt somebody had to carry that torch, so I chose in that time period, to form an exploratory project. Obviously I had to convince management and so on that this was the right thing to do. Again, kind of a thankless job at the time, it was going to put us lower on the list of people who should get rewards and awards and so on, but I felt very strongly that this was needed and that it was really in line with my personal goals to be a researcher and to do well, and again to carry through and be sure that at the end of this period, which I was fairly sure would be a period again, because I was convinced that the goals overall of the company weren_t going to change, that at the other end I wanted to be sure that I had a department to work in that was still doing exploratory work and still knew how to do that. So I chose very consciously to lead an exploratory project during that period. Now that the period is coming, the pendulum is swinging back towards exploratory, virtue has it_s own rewards, now people are saying thank goodness somebody was still out there publishing and keeping our name in the papers and we_re still a highly ranked department.

In summary, you define success. It_s really a personal choice. You_ve heard from all four of us very different sorts of goals, so you really have to take a good look at your personality and your abilities and figure out what_s going to do it for you. Secondly, I really strongly suggest that whatever you do you care about it. If you don_t care about it, you_re not going to do a good job and you_re not going to be rewarded, and you_re not going to be successful. So do it well and let people know that you_re doing it well, but do it subtly. And then change is normal, it is happening all the time and you need to take an active role in it whether, as Rosemary said, it_s your own change, your own growth, or something that_s going to be foisted on you from outside, recognize the necessity, preferably before it hits you, and then find the opportunities, because there are always opportunities for people in a time of change.

The other thing I was just going to slide up here for those who want it. We hire, but probably not as much as Dona_s group, but people that do want perspective or whatever else, that is my logistics. It_s a San Jose, California address.

Joann Ordille: We hire too, and I think Margaret Wright did an advertisement in the previous panel about that.

Laura Haas: I put my web page up there although I can_t remember whether it_s people slash Laura, or *** Laura. So if one doesn_t work try the other, just so you can go check out my picture. I_m the wicked witch, I_ll give you all a hint. And that_s what I wanted to say.

Joann Ordille: So we_re not open for questions, and we ask that you use the microphone so everyone is recorded.

Audience Question: Hi, Marsha Deer from US West Advance Technologies. Laura, I_d like to hear a little more about your sabbatical. Why you felt the need to re-learn how to do research even though you had been successful in publishing and doing research, etc.

Laura Haas: Okay. It_s a little hard. Up to that point the research positions I had held, I really felt like the work had been handed to me. I joined the research team doing distributed database when I first came, and people kind of told me, here are the interesting problems. I wasn_t a database person, I was a distributed algorithms person, so I didn_t know what the interesting problems were in distributed database research. So I was handed problems and I did them. I enjoyed it, it was good. Then, again, I was handed a project, and the first time I was handed a project somebody said, I think there_s a need for us to look again at the query processing technology for database and how to make it more extensible. I still wasn_t a database person, I had published a couple of database papers by then, but I didn_t really know. I was privileged or not, depending on how you look at, to be handed a really incredibly strong group at that time. Really brilliant researchers. One of them is now an IBM fellow, another is the head of our database technology institute, a third is one of my peer managers now, fourth is a programmer who is at the highest technical rank in the company. These were just an incredible team of people, and they were all prima donnas, so most of my job was to keep them working together so we actually got something built, and that didn_t leave a whole lot of time for building up my own career. I got a lot of credit for the work that was done, and I really don_t think it could have been done without me, but I never felt confident in my soul that I was doing the research. Then I managed the department, and I started a lot of nice projects, and those were ideas that came from me, and by then I knew what good topics were and so on, but I didn_t get to do the research again. At some point, I needed to get out of that. It_s hard when you_re sitting there and you_re doing well at a job, people either just want you to keep doing that job or to take the one above it, to keep going in that path. I could see, my manager I knew was planning to leave, so I knew there was going to be a change in the next year or so. I felt that I had accomplished what I wanted to accomplish with the department, so I was really looking for an avenue to get out, but I couldn_t find it there. It was also very awkward I felt to a point, a new department head and go work for him. That_s the sort of thing that often makes people very uncomfortable, to have the old department head working for you directly. So I thought that if I got away for a year that would be a really good thing.

Audience Question: Karin Petersen, Xerox PARC. Many of your mentioned that caring is something really important, I wonder if you can care too much. Every once in a while I have caught myself in a position where I_m so emotionally drained that I wonder if I care too much and should gain some distance and come back to it again, after all it_s a job it_s not my life. I just want a comment on that.

***: That_s very true. I think you need to back up occasionally just to get perspective. That sometimes you do get too close, then again it may tell you that it_s time to leave or do something about it. I find that I get myself out of a funk because bad things are happening, is to do something about it and to see a change.

***: I guess I don_t think you can care too much. I think it does require perspective and getting away from it and getting a different view so you can look at what the problem is that you_re dealing with and whether it_s a personnel problem or a programmatic problem or a personal problem. It_s that passion about those problems that allow you to make the changes that are positive and propel the hull forward.

Audience Question: I_d like to address my question primarily to Laura, but I wonder if other people also have comments. You had talked about a lack of a soul and a heart in the department and that you wanted to give it one, I wonder what you think constitutes that, I wonder what you did, and I wonder if the others also have a similar perception of how you evaluate or regard the culture of the area where you work.

Laura Haas: What do I mean by not having a heart or a soul. One of the things I most wanted to fix in the department was a sense of people sort of drifting along. We had at that point two research projects, which is pretty thin for what wanted to be a major database department, and they never interacted. There didn_t seem to be much exchange of idea except within the little teams that were doing the work. I felt that people felt isolated, and that the department didn_t really have a sense of itself as a department, that you were identified. You may be identified with your project a little bit, but at that point at least one of our project managers was pretty weak. I_m not even sure if his team identified with his project particularly, so I really wanted to give people something that they could point to and be proud of being part of that organization. That_s what I mean by a heart and a soul. Someplace that, just know you belong to that department made people already feel halfway successful, then they could make the rest of it. But it would make them happy, it would give them something to base themselves in.

Dona Crawford: I_ll comment. We almost killed computing at Sandia for a while, then grew it back to ten times what it was before we killed it. I was managing computing at that time, so it was one of the changes I didn_t talk about when I had my opening remarks. We are also a distributed laboratory, we have a location in Livermore, California and one in Albuquerque, New Mexico. I was managing both sides. The people in Livermore, California were losing all their computing resources to Albuquerque, New Mexico and they thought they had no reason to continue to stay at the laboratory, so we had lost our spirit and our soul. First of all, how would I define a spirit and a soul. It_s that you feel you have a focused area that you_re all contributing to and it_s challenging so that you feel that you_re growing and it_s meaningful work. That_s what constitutes a spirit and a soul. What was required was to try to figure out what was the new focus area for that group that was complimentary now to the work going on in New Mexico so that we had a hull, a bigger hull, and it turns out we did team building exercises and a lot of us, through the course, we had a sense of family. We then sort of co-founded our own new purpose for that particular group, which was, because we were a distributed lab, and the main computing resources were now in New Mexico, was what would be the networking challenges that would allow us to be leaders and also connect into our mother laboratory so to speak, so we found a new purpose, and had a lot of fun, but it was really a hard time.

Audience Question: Hi, I_m Sarah Graham from John Hopkins and my question is, did any of you consider *Academia as a different alternative career path? And if so, why didn_t you choose that? And if not, why didn_t you consider it a viable option?

*Joann Ordille: I_ll start because it_s simple. I don_t have a Ph.D. So I could never consider an academic career path, unless I wanted to finish my Ph.D. and I chose not to because I got my second master_s late in my 20_s and at that time I also started my family, and so to keep that balance I did not want to go back to school, have a family, and have a career.

Rosemary Chang: That has always been an option for me, and that_s something that I keep out there. I have been having a lot of fun in industry. I know it well I know what to do, so as long as that happens, I think I_ll stay in industry. There are things that I can still do. For me to go to a completely different sector would require a start up time, and right now I_m not willing to take that. Things may change in the future and that may be something that I might retire from industry, but right now I_m having too much of good time.

Laura Haas: I actually spent a lot of time struggling with this issue. When I graduated I interviewed very extensively in both research laboratories and at universities, and I had job offers in both areas. I think for me what it came down to in the end was I looked at why I wanted to be at a university. If I was to go to a university I would go there to teach. That_s the major appeal that it has for me. I looked at what the evaluation procedure was at universities and the evaluation procedure is not substantially based on teaching ability or teaching accomplishment, it_s based on research accomplishment. So I felt that if I went to a university, I would always be in a double bind, at least through tenure. Because what I would most want to do, what would be most exciting to me, wasn_t the thing that I was really being evaluated on being paid to do. And that even though in some sense what I do for the company now, for Lucent, is what the university wanted me to do. It feels better because what they want me to do, and what I_m agreeing to do and why I went there are the same. Whereas at the university, just the disparity between what tenure evaluates and what I would want to do there I thought would be very difficult. Also, it_s the case, that when you work for Bell Labs, there_s a lot of freedom, and you can in fact teach if you want to teach. You can have students come in for the summer and supervise them and help them to learn to be researchers and you can teach at the surrounding universities and so, the opportunity to teach was still available to me at Bell Labs.

Dona Crawford: To make it really short, I was too insecure when I came out of graduate school to be able to contemplate forming my own research group and charting my own trajectory at that point and teaching. I didn_t know what I knew that could possibly a value to anybody else at that point. I went through my Ph.D. program exceedingly fast, mostly because as it turned out, my advisor, unbeknownst to me, was planning to switch schools and wanted to be done with his students before hand. I just didn_t get enough hardening there, and by the time that I was hardened enough to think that might actually be kind of fun, I was doing really well in industry and so I never looked back. As Joann says, we do get opportunities. I do get to go and lecture at Berkeley and Stanford when I want to. I have been offered the opportunity to teach classes at both of those schools, so if I want to do it it_s there, but heck, I_m having a lot of fun.

Audience Question: Good afternoon. My name is Kimberly Oda, and I_m a master_s candidate at the University of California Berkeley, to graduate May 22nd at 9:00 am. I_m excited. I had a general question. You all laid a nice foundation for what you_re doing and what you_ve done. I_m kind of curious as to how you got there. Meaning something as simple as, I know Joann just said you interviewed extensively. So I_m curious to know, to me in order to be successful you have to have an initial step into that particular field, and I actually want to know what was your initial step in getting into that field? Maybe something as simple as I knew somebody that knew somebody that knew somebody, or something like that.

Rosemary Chang: My specialty is Computer and Geometric Design, but my thesis wasn_t really in that area. It was in a related area, numerical analysis. It started at Sandia and it turns out one of the problems they asked me to solve was a research interest of my thesis advisor_s post doc a number of years before me. And I ran into him at a SIAM meeting and I introduced myself and that began a good working relationship. So, serendipity happened, I happened to meet him at the right time, and there was an interest, the company supported it, this interest it was something that was new to me, it was a new area, so that_s how I got into it. It just continued from there. Go to conferences.

Laura Haas: I decided to go to the Bay Area because my husband wanted to go back to graduate school after putting me through graduate school. I thought he deserved that, he got into Stanford after all. So I interviewed a bunch of different places in the Bay Area in general, and actually did not interview IBM because they just never responded to me until very late. I was almost about to accept a job, well I was torn between Intel and Lawrence Livermore at the time when they called me up and said come interview. But it was the wrong department there. It was the storage systems people who designed disks, and I didn_t know anything about designing disks. But they looked at my advisor_s name, and he was famous for his work in performance. Not the work that I_d been doing in distributed algorithms, so they figured how could any student of his not know something about performance. So at that point, because it was so late in the game and I already had offers, I basically threw a temper tantrum. I said I_ll come out, because I wasn_t really thrilled with either of the jobs, but I want to talk to somebody in Computer Science. So they promised me that somebody from Computer Science would be on my schedule, and actually what they did was they didn_t put anybody on my schedule, but they sent two people to my talk, and as luck would have it they thought they knew more than I did about deadlock detection, and as luck would have it I knew more than they did about deadlock detection. So, I was able to impress them enough to get an offer and I decided that because they were a research lab and I wanted to keep my options open to go that way, and also because they offered the most money, and my advisor_s advice was always take the job that offers you the most money.

Dona Crawford: I had somewhat a convoluted path. I had a bachelor_s degree in Math and German and I wanted to be a teacher, and when I came back with a master_s degree in German, because I thought I could teach math pretty comfortably and confidently, I didn_t think I could speak German, so I went to Germany to get a master_s degree in German. Then I came back prepared to teach now that I could speak German fluently. As luck would have it, there was a *** of teachers at that time, and I could not get a teaching job. So, I started sending out applications to, primarily government agencies, thinking I have a bachelor_s degree in math, and I_m very mathematically minded, very logical, and I have this language skill, so somebody in ***, CIA, any three letter organization would take me, so I started sending resumes like crazy. I send hundreds of resumes out to companies, and I was not in school at the time and I was certainly not in a technical school at the time, so I didn_t have any career counseling or help if you will, and I got all these rejections and I got very depressed, and finally I got really cheeky. I think finally it was my attitude that got someone willing to take a risk with me, and it was Sandia, and it was if you really want someone who is willing to make a difference and change things and take a fresh perspective, hire me I_m the person. They said, okay, show us. So that is how I got there. And then they did send me back to school and I could have pursued my Ph.D. but as I said earlier, I did not finish that.

Joann Ordille: I guess I probably ought to start at the bachelor_s. I got a bachelor_s in Applied Math and Philosophy at George Washington University in Washington D.C. Then I decided to go to graduate school. And I thought Computer Science, Math, Philosophy. Philosophy would probably really be fun so I went to grad school in the History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh, and when I got there, I eventually got a master_s in Philosophy, I decided that it really wasn_t what I thought it was. I thought it was the history of ideas, understanding how different people think and stuff, but it was really very precise analytical philosophy on small incremental problems, so I decided I didn_t want to do that, and I took a job at CMU in systems software. I got that job, I was told later, because the manager who hired me decided that a really bright person who knew very little about computing could learn really fast and become a systems programmer, and might be better at than someone who actually had had training. That was my first job. I eventually managed that systems software group and then I moved to Wisconsin and worked for a digital equipment corporation as a consultant. I did distributed system, operating system and network consulting. I got very good at network troubleshooting so that people would pay hundreds of dollars an hour to have me go and fix their networks when they broke. And that got to be a rather dull job because the people paid so much money for it, and there was so much demand for it, I was really good at it, and I didn_t learn anything new. It was at that point that I decided to go back to graduate school and round out my education and just see how it goes, get a master_s or a Ph.D. So, when I got to graduate school, I discovered that it was really hard to locate people I_d known during my career, people at *** and people at CMU and so my research topic for my Ph.D. was how to search directory systems on the internet so that you could locate people wherever they were. That was my research topic, and I was totally motivated to pursue this topic because it was a problem that I wanted to solve for myself. It just happened to turn out that when I graduated, serendipitously, everyone in the world had realized that this was a really significant problem. So, I interviewed at all these places. I think I did 17 interviews. Because when I graduated, my topic was really hot, and I did a good job. Looking back on it, could I have said when I started my research as a graduate student that my topic would be so hot when I graduated, and I don_t think so. It just was really fascinating and motivating to me.

Audience Question: *** from Northwestern University. I am an undergraduate senior and I_m trying to decide whether to go into a master_s, a terminal master_s program, a Ph.D. program and eventually I want to go into industry. And I was wondering if you guys had any recommendations of how you feel. If it_s okay just to try out with the master_s and see how far you can get, or you_re saying that you already know there_s going to be a block somewhere, a wall that_s going to stop you and you_re not going to get further in your career.

Rosemary Chang: You_ve already applied to school_s right?

Audience: Yes.

Rosemary Chang: And do all the schools have both a Ph.D. and a master_s program?

Audience: They_re pretty flexible right now. Like I_m going to *** so I have options.

Rosemary Chang: It really depends on the kind of job you want. If it_s research than you probably need a Ph.D. However, if you want to follow technology, program it, find a programming job, which are very good satisfying, lucrative, then you probably don_t need a Ph.D. A master_s, and I hesitate to say it, but we hire a lot of bachelor_s and they do very well. In fact, you learn on the job. Because a lot of what you need to do has not been created yet. So we_re looking for very smart people who can learn as they go and develop as they go. That does not necessarily require a Ph.D. We do hire a few Ph.D._s. We like a good mix. But it_s not necessary for you to be successful at a place like SGI.

Joann Ordille: My first intuition was to say, say you_re going to go for the Ph.D. and see how it turns out and maybe decide to just keep the master_s. This was sort of my approach. I was admitted as a Ph.D. student, but I always thought, if I don_t like this, when the master_s comes around, then I_m going to walk. I don_t know enough about CMU_s programs these days. They were always rather distinctive as I recall and so I don_t know if you can do that there. The other thing I sort of feel obligated to point out is that a lot of people in Ph.D. programs these days, especially those in computer networking, often leave before their Ph.D. to start a company. So there is this other path that's sort of like the Master_s plus working in industry path that people have been pursuing. One graduate student who worked with me at Bell Labs was a founder of a company and is now a rather rich guy.

Laura Haas: I was going to say the same thing as Joann. In fact, that_s how I ended up getting a Ph.D. was I felt that after college I felt I needed to learn more about computing because in my day there was no such thing as a computer science major. I was an Applied Math major, so I wanted to go and get a master_s and my father said, no it_s a lot easier to go from a Ph.D. program into a Master_s, and just quit early then to go from a Master_s. They peg you if you_re in a Master_s and they won_t always let you upgrade. So, if you_re torn, apply for the Ph.D. program and drop out if you want to. The problem with that is my father pretty well knew that I_m a very goal oriented person and having set myself the goal of getting a Ph.D. there was no way I was going to quit. But other people may have a little more flexibility in their characters.

***: But you can do both. We have lots of researchers in our lab that are Master_s level people. They started out in programming jobs and decided they like the programming in a research environment and there are a lot of people who are really surprised to find some of the software engineers working with us are not Ph.D._s because you really can_t tell the difference after a while.

***: I_ll give the last perspective. I think in the end it won_t matter. What Rosemary said is most important. What are your career goals? But you_ll always wonder if you don_t go get your Ph.D. And if you have that opportunity and you have the time and it_s not interrupting something else that you_re doing right now, I would highly recommend it. You_ll never regret it.

Rosemary Chang: That_s really true. It_s one of those things that you look back on as an incredible achievement that continues to amaze you as the years go by.

Joann Ordille: Okay, I see that we_re pretty much out of time, so that you all and it_s been fun chatting with you.