I spent three days in Pittsburgh at the WEPAN conference and I'll be doing a series of posts that you could loosely call reporting from the conference. Okay, it's my analysis of the bits and pieces I was able to attend and/or that I think are most interesting/relevant/juicy. But isn't that reporting?
Some of it was on the program, some of it wasn't. We'll start with Tuesday's luncheon keynote. The speaker was Dr. Priscilla P. Nelson, Provost and Senior VP for Academic Affairs, New Jersey Institute of Technology. The lunch was turkey wraps with a pasta salad. I sat between two other folks who, like me, had dietary restrictions. Despite our filling out registration information months ago and being reassured at onsite registration that the kitchen knew all about our needs and our meals would be specially prepared, the wait staff went into panic mode and seemed completely unable to cope. Okay, I'll admit, "no onion" is a bit of an unusual one. And the woman next to me who wanted no beef - that's a little easier, but who would have suspected the pasta salad had beef stock in it? Okay, just give her a damn fruit cup and be done with it. But what really floored me was they absolutely did not accommodate the gentleman with diabetes in anyway whatsoever. Now, come on. Diabetes? That's got to be one of the most common dietary issues encountered in the hotel/restaurant industry!
There, I feel much better after that rant.
Anyhoo, Dr. Nelson gave an excellent luncheon speech, "Partnering Across Sectors: Close Encounters of a Flexible Kind". The partnering across sectors stuff was less interesting to me than her description of her career path to her current position. One usually thinks of that path as a very narrow, linear one: undergrad, grad school, postdoc, assistant prof, tenure & promotion to associate prof, promotion to full prof, department chair, dean, provost. Very linear, very academic. Here's what Dr. Nelson gave us on one slide as her "career path"
Geologist, Housepainter, Peace Corps, Singer in a Bar, Trans-Alaska Pipeline Construction, Structural Engineer, Tunnel Engineer, Professor at UT Austin, Consultant, Superconducting Supercollider Project in Texas, NSF, Provost at NJIT
She has a master's degree in geology (Indiana U.) and another in structural engineering (University of Oklahoma), and a PhD in geotechnical engineering (Cornell). She taught herself variational calculus so that she could successfully complete her graduate studies.
I mean, this woman just keeps going and going and going...
But as you will surely have noted, she did not go down that rigid, narrow academic corridor...no, she has wandered gloriously in space and time, and all that nonlinearity has made her into a fantastic leader. She noted that many of the women of her generation had nonlinear paths, which she feels is responsible for a great deal of their effectiveness, but also, perhaps, for some of their isolation. "Women in technology experience isolation, even in a crowd." She also made these observations about women in science and technology careers:
Now, lest you think Dr. Nelson is some kind of outlier data point, go read Journeys of Women in Science and Engineering: No Universal Constants. And if you are just starting your own journey through graduate school, check out the Woman's Guide to Navigating the PhD in Science and Engineering. Zuska wishes for all of you a gloriously messy nonlinear career full of fun.
4:01:38 PM 
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