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'There are so few women studying engineering in college," says Mary Ellen Randall, the 2005 chair of the Women in Engineering (WIE) committee of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). "It can be very awkward for them, and they often feel isolated in that environment. That's why experienced women engineers play an important role in enabling other women to succeed and advance. We can share our insights and help them deal with challenges and difficulties."
The WIE promotes science and technology education to girls and young women from elementary school to college. It also supports women's EE careers and entry into the field.
"More diversity in the profession is good for everyone," Randall says. "As we get more women in the engineering workforce, we'll address different problems and we'll drive different solutions into the marketplace. And that can only enrich the world."
Balancing career and family
Engineering careers frequently require putting in long hours, Randall says, so retention can be a problem. Women can lose ground because they carry primary responsibility for their families.
"Fortunately, innovations like remote computing, multiple-way conference calling and cell phones have made it easier for women in the EE workforce," says Randall. "These technologies have given them the ability to respond when necessary, stay up to date, be in contact, and have the flexibility that is so essential for their full participation in this field."
Technology along with family-friendly policies is key, she says. "It helps if women can work from home one day, or work from home in the morning, take the kids to the doctor at lunch, and then head into the office. Reentry can also be an issue for women who take a break from the workplace to raise young children," Randall adds.
Distance learning and technical documentation can help too. "At the IEEE, women have access to experts all over the world who are continuously publishing new information.
"Engineering is an ever changing field, so you always have to keep up on your skills."
Looking ahead
Randall hopes young women will continue to choose professions that utilize their math and science abilities. "The future is up to us, and it's bright," she says. "We can support and mentor each other to be the empowered professionals that we are meant to be."
These young women have all found excellent positions as recent EE grads. Some have gone directly from their BSEE to work; others have pursued MSEEs prior to starting their careers. But each has found support for her success in a field that is still very male-dominated.
Amira G. Koerner: EE at Aerospace Corp
Amira G. Koerner has been a member of the technical staff at the Aerospace Corporation (El Segundo, CA) since 2003. She got her BSEE from UCLA (Los Angeles, CA) in 2001, and her MSEE with a focus on digital signal processing from Stanford University (Palo Alto, CA) two years later.
Math and science classes in high school were integral to Koerner's interest in engineering. Her dad, a professor in ME at UCLA, encouraged her to look at EE because, "It has a lot of physics and a lot of job opportunities."
As an undergrad Koerner did three summer internships at Aerospace, which operates a federally funded research and development center that supports space programs. She started as a full-time employee there after her graduate education. "I wanted to study electrical engineering more in depth before I started working," she says, "and I really enjoyed school so I wanted to continue."
At Aerospace Koerner does programming in Visual C++, "designing graphical user interfaces to control a receiver designed on a FPGA (field programmable gate array)." She did similar work on a DSP (digital signal processor) chip, and also runs simulations to investigate the performance of adaptive antennas.
"Studying theory in school, students often don't realize how much programming is involved in electrical engineering. Unless they take project courses, they don't get to see the applications," Koerner says. "Solving engineering problems at work is a very open process with much dynamic troubleshooting. The research being done, the freedom I have in my job, and the people I work with make Aerospace a great fit for me."
Koerner found few women in her undergraduate classes and even fewer in graduate school. The minority engineering groups at UCLA and Stanford, she says, helped her "meet other women, fine tune my career choices, find my internships, and connect with the industry.
"Electrical engineering is not the easiest career to fit into and find your place as a woman. You may not have many mentors or people who are like you. In my subdivision, for example, I don't think there are any other women my age.
"At the same time, you get a lot of opportunities as a woman," she says. "People notice you because you're unique, and I've found that they really want to see you succeed."
Heather Babcock: technical marketing engineer for National Semiconductor
Heather Babcock has been working for National Semiconductor (Santa Clara, CA) since graduating with her BSEE from Union College (Schenectady, NY) in 2002. She started in a rotation program for marketing engineers and has been a technical marketing engineer with the audio amplifier group for the past two years.
Babcock found her job at a career fair. "I was especially interested in National," she says, "because it works with semiconductors that actually go inside consumer electronics.
"My work is more on the business side than the engineering side," Babcock says, "but my technical background helps quite a bit in helping to develop the right products."
Babcock does market field research through direct customer contact, project managing and product development. "We bring the product from an idea to an actual silicon part that goes into a cell phone or a laptop.
"In school, engineering is very conceptual. You learn how a circuit works, but you never see the final product," Babcock says, "At work, you see the whole cycle. It's fun, interesting and very fulfilling."
Babcock started college in applied mathematics and tried an engineering course as an elective. "I was very excited when I saw how much math is in electrical engineering, and then I was hooked."
The students in Babcock's classes were predominantly male, but women engineers were represented on campus through SWE and the IEEE. "A couple of the IEEE officers were women and I joined as one of their public relations people. My relationships with these women made it more comfortable. While I wasn't intimidated by my male counterparts, it was definitely reassuring to have women friends in the engineering group."
Students should "explore all the resources, options, and possibilities out there," she says. "If I hadn't known that I could be an engineer, or I hadn't known about National Semiconductor, then I might not be as happy as I am now."
Evelyn Lock: hardware engineer at Applied Signal Technology
Evelyn Lock started working at Applied Signal Technology (Sunnyvale, CA) in August 2004, two months after she received her BSEE from the University of California-Davis (Davis, CA). The company's signal processing equipment collects and processes telecommunications signals for reconnaissance, industry and defense communications systems. "I was very lucky. At career fairs I looked for companies that specialized in signal processing work, as that was my emphasis in school. Applied Signal was one of my top choices."
Lock went to Skyline Community College (San Bruno, CA) and transferred to UC-Davis as a math major. She switched to EE because "It was more applied science and included a lot of physics." Lock's undergraduate research position at UC-Davis gave her hands-on experience doing random tests and documenting circuitry.
A project class in college prepared her well for collaborative team work in her job, she says. "Learning theory at college is very different than the real world. When you go to a lab in school, you're told what parts to use. All you have to do is go to the parts room and get them. But in the workplace, there are so many more technical details you need to know."
As a hardware engineer at Applied Signal, Lock says she does a lot of signal processing and works with programmable devices and FPGAs. "I always liked my digital classes, where I built little circuits and plugged chips into proto-boards," she says. "I thought that was exciting and I'm glad I can apply what I learned.
"I was definitely anxious about electrical engineering as a college student, because, as a female, I was a minority," she says. "But I never felt looked down upon. I think you get respect when you demonstrate your knowledge."
Lock was involved with both SWE and IEEE while she was in school. "It was great for networking. Being around other women engineers was encouraging, and we learned from each other's experiences.
"It's easy to be intimidated as a female studying electrical engineering. When it comes down to it, though, it's about dedication and determination. I know that's been very true for me. It's important to be ambitious and stay focused on your goal."
Kendra Kumley: Rockwell Collins EE
Kendra Kumley has been an antenna designer in the advanced technology center at Rockwell Collins (Cedar Rapids, IA), a provider of aviation electronic and communication solutions, since January 2005. Kumley received her BSEE from the University of Colorado (Colorado Springs, CO) in the spring of 2002, and her MSEE from the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology (Rapid City, SD) in May 2005.
Kumley's dad, an EE, encouraged his children to go into engineering. She tried an EE class in college and "absolutely loved" it, and ultimately went straight from undergraduate to graduate school. "I really liked the academic world and I was still very happy being a full-time student. I wasn't ready to be done studying and I felt that I was finally getting to the good stuff.
"Plus, a masters degree opens doors," Kumley says. "It's easier to get into research and development with an MSEE than a BSEE. For students who are interested in doing research, it's worth thinking about going on for their graduate degree. So many people told me, 'I can't believe you're not getting a job right away.' For my interests, getting an MSEE worked very well."
A summer internship at NASA's Jet Propulsion Labs gave Kumley experience with a calibration scheme for a phased ray antenna. She found her job at Rockwell Collins through a graduate school career fair, and now works again with antenna design and calibration schemes. She is the only female in her group, but says that everyone has been supportive.
Kumley says networking, socializing and getting to know others provides her with information and mentoring at Rockwell Collins. "Study groups and your classmates make college a great place to acquire the people skills you need at work," Kumley reflects. "It doesn't pay to be shy. The curriculum is not easy, and most engineers know how important it is to have a study buddy or somebody you work well with and learn from."
Kumley reports no problems studying in a field that was not traditionally female. "Every so often you found people who didn't take you seriously as a woman in electrical engineering, but they quickly learned to respect you. The most important thing was to stick with it."
Esther Jun: EE at JHU APL
Esther Jun started working at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab (APL, Laurel, MD) in June 2004 right after graduate school. She received her BS (2003) and her masters (2004) in electrical and computer engineering from Cornell University (Ithaca, NY). A summer internship before graduate school at IBM's Watson Research Center (Yorktown, NY) gave Jun valuable experience in both Java programming and an R&D organization.
Jun found her job at APL through a career fair at Cornell. APL is a large campus about a half hour from the Johns Hopkins main campus in Baltimore. Jun works for the theater missiles systems engineering group in the air defense systems department at APL. "I analyze data and estimate system performance for the Aegis ballistic missile defense program.
"What you work on at school is so small in scope compared to the real world," Jun says. "These are massive systems that involve many more people and organizations. It's not just you working on a well-defined problem set or in a lab with a partner."
At APL, Jun says, "Just being around so many extremely intelligent people and learning every day from them is really nice. You get to interact with a lot of different people who have really in-depth knowledge of specific fields."
EE was especially interesting to Jun during her freshman year in college. "I was able to focus on signal processing and the math and physics that I have always enjoyed. Someday, I would like to pursue a PhD in applied mathematics."
There were few other women in both her undergraduate and graduate classes, Jun says. "We all knew each other. Some of them are still my closest friends. I don't think we ever felt too alienated because we were women, but it also helped that we were friends with one another.
"It's tough sometimes being a minority in a field that is so completely male-dominated," says Jun. "Women going into electrical engineering should try to not get bogged down competing with other people."
Anita Thomas: performance engineer at EMC Corp
Anita Thomas has been working at EMC Corporation (Hopkinton, MA) since August 2004. She graduated in September 2004 from Northeastern University (Boston, MA) with her MSEE with a major in computer engineering and a concentration in computer architecture. She found her job at a grad school career fair.
Thomas completed her bachelor of engineering at Mumbai University (Mumbai, India) in June 2000, majoring in electronics. Her subsequent work as a systems engineer in India, she says, "triggered my interest in computer architecture."
EMC specializes in information lifecycle management. Thomas serves as a performance engineer in EMC's Symmetrix performance group. "I identify and analyze the root cause of performance bottlenecks in the EMC Symmetrix storage platform.
"Working requires accountability and meeting more rigid timelines than studying at school. More team interactions and group work are involved. This job has provided a hands-on and practical perspective to the theoretical knowledge I gained in school."
With her interests in mathematics, physics and computers, Thomas says, "Engineering was the obvious choice for a college degree." Her mother taught mathematics in school, which also influenced her.
Thomas worked long hours and balanced her course work, research work and teaching assistantship duties throughout graduate school. She says that in addition to her course work, working on her thesis and attending conferences helped her career.
"Women were a minority in all of my classes, but overall I was treated as an equal to my male counterparts," Thomas says. "I would have really liked to see more women pursuing engineering degrees."
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