9 good bits of advice I've gotten as a student

I'm (hopefully) in the last year of my PhD, and along the way, I've gotten a lot of good advice from people at Carleton: students, profs, admin staff. Here's a few bits that I'd like to share:

1. Making friends is important, not only for your sanity but also for academic success in later years. You need people you can trust for those group projects!
   
   
2. If your TA can't speak English, complain. A few years ago, they made it possible for TAs to be sent to remedial English training. It's free for the TA, and they don't lose their future TA jobs, so you're pretty much doing everyone a favour by helping them learn to do their job better.
   
   
3. It may seem that everyone else is way ahead of you in class. But actually, a lot of other people are just stupidly arrogant. You're probably way more awesome than you think, and other people are probably struggling with the same things you struggle with.
   
   
4. Your course schedule may not work out every year. If you're in a smaller degree program, you might even find that it's not possible to complete your degree without substituting things because your required courses are offered at the same time! If you run up against a wall, talk to the undergraduate/graduate advisor in your department. They can help figure out what to do.
   
   
5. If you have any problem with registration or any other administrative thing, make sure to talk to the admin staff in person. Our administrative staff is excellent, and they can solve a lot of problems that the computer systems deem impossible. Just remember to be polite, and try to show up when they're not busy!
   
   
6. You can skip classes by challenging for credit. It costs money, but can get you out of stuff that would be a waste of your time. That said, easy As are great ways to buoy up your scholarship marks if you're willing to sit around being bored. (that's what I did in first year.)
   
   
7. You can take upper year classes early, sometimes without prerequisites, if you're willing to work for it. Sit in on the first few classes and then ask the prof to sign the necessary paperwork when you're more sure, or just ask them for their advice. You can also take graduate courses as an undergraduate! (I did this, and it's how I wound up doing graduate school!) Graduate courses sometimes have an easier workload than the undergraduate ones, but you'll have to do a lot more independent thinking, so be prepared!
   
   
8. If you're struggling in a class very early on, it's perfectly ok to drop classes and take them later. Sometimes the prof's teaching style won't mesh with your learning style and you should take it with someone else, sometimes you're just too busy with other courses. Before you drop anything, though, make sure you do it properly in the system before the drop date so you don't get an F, make sure you can take the class later or substitute another class, and make sure it's not a prerequisite that will mess up your schedule for the next term!
   
   
9. Find a few good places to hang out and spend more time on campus. Having a place you can sit where you can let off steam with a game of cards, meet up with your friends, curl up on a couch for an hour, or even just buy cheaper snacks/coffee can be invaluable. I lived off-campus as an undergraduate and tended to go home frequently in my first year, but I didn't really find a love for Carleton until I started hanging out with the Math Society.
   

And nowadays, obviously I recommend you all join WISE, too!

So welcome to the new students this year! And for those of you returning, I'm sure you've gotten some great advice too. Got anything you'd like to share?

My journey from high school to grad school

After finishing my master's in engineering at Carleton University a few weeks ago, I have begun to reminisce about my life, and more specifically, what I want to share with you in this blog. I thought about my experiences at last year's Grace Hopper conference, about my experiences as co-founder and external affairs executive of WISE (Women in Science and Engineering), and about my experiences as a teaching assistant. I realized that, even though my thesis was a struggle, the past 2 years have been the best years of my life and I am very thankful for that. I would like to share my personal experiences with you.

I vaguely remember high school, but I remember that I felt like a somebody. I did well academically, I won awards and bursaries, all the teachers saw great potential in me, I got along with the "nerds" and the "cool" people (which doesn't really mean anything in life beyond high school), I was voted best dressed in my last year, I discovered I had a passion for writing poetry, I was a Peer Helper Leader, I was a photographer for the Yearbook, and I founded the Anti-Abuse Team. Outside of school I was becoming a kick butt martial artist and spent a lot of time with my family. I believe that my parents worked very hard to make sure I developed strong family values and that I enjoyed spending time with them. As a result, my social life was at a minimum before I reached adulthood. Maybe good, maybe bad, but I seem to have turned out well.

Moving on, when it came time to choose what I wanted to study next, I knew I wanted to get into engineering or computer science. My mom has a master's in civil engineering so she wanted me to go into that. But my primary goal was to study something very challenging as I felt that high school didn't do it for me. Now that I think about it, I believe it was the teachers that made me that confident, hehe. So I chose to go into engineering physics because I liked physics and I didn't want to be restricted only to programming. But the main reason was because it was known as the most difficult program in engineering at Carleton. And so it was.

Undergrad turned out to be the biggest shock of my life. I wasn't at the top of my class anymore and the boys had caught up with me. Even though I ended up ranking 4th out of 11 students in my program (and the top female) and 30th out of all 354 engineering students, I still felt like a fraud. I condemned myself that I didn't do it alone. I survived the program because I got a lot of help from the "smart ones" and because I had the discipline to work hard. What a wake up call that was. I remember consistently being stressed and pressed for time, I was jealous of anyone who had a weekend off, and I can admit that there were days when I broke down into tears. On the positive side, I think the Engineering Physics Program was still the best choice for me as it was like going to the academic army. I obviously got what I asked for. Engineering physics students became problem-solving soldiers. For example, we were taught to write down all assumptions, be very precise in our error analysis, to never ever forget units, and to always explain all the possible causes of error in our results. We began to realize that the results didn't matter as much as the accuracy of the results and how the accuracy could be increased. But enough with the nerdy talk.

Upon graduation, I decided I'm still not smart enough to enter the real world. So I signed up for grad school in the department of electronics. But meanwhile I went backpacking to Europe. After the 2-month trip, I didn't want to come back to school but at the same time I knew travelling some more was going to make me feel unaccomplished. So I came back and started my thesis early. For 2 months I researched possible topics for my thesis and it was in those 2 months that I somehow got into WISE. I remember the exact steps that I took to get there. One, I felt liberated of my primary duty to get a bachelor's degree. Two, I missed the good old days in high school when I was more involved in my school community. And three, I was very upset I didn't get an NSERC (Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council) or an OGS (Ontario Graduate) scholarship. I'm not sure if I should be ashamed of this but that's when it hit me the most. I thought, man I worked so hard, had good grades, and even published a research paper, but still I wasn't good enough. So I googled "women, engineering, and Carleton" and found a crappy looking website about Carleton's WISE group. I thought to myself: this is my chance to show them there's more to me than they think. I knew I wasn't an average engineer with average skills and most definitely not an average woman.

The WISE Carleton representative, Tarah, got back to me and invited me for coffee. When I met her at Rooster's, I was surprised to see that another woman was there to meet Tarah. Her name was Serena and she was in computer science. That meeting was another shock in my life because I felt like I just got connected to a whole new world and it made my heart smile. A few months later Serena and I recruited Gail, Natalia and Lindsay, and all 5 of us re-built Carleton's WISE group (and that website is definitely far from crappy looking now). My primary goal wasn't to help more women get scholarships as that is the train of thought that led me to be involved in this group. Upon meeting these awesome women, I realized that they are the support group I needed to help me reach my goals... and I wanted to help other women attain that too. By the way, I ended up getting that OGS scholarship in my second year of grad school as well as a Carleton Graduate Student Association Honour Award for my work with WISE, and a scholarship to help pay for attending the Grace Hopper conference this year (I also applied last year but didn't receive one).

So how has WISE benefited me? I never know where to start when someone asks me that. Here is my short answer: I now have an awesome support group of women executives who I want to one day start a business with. Who would have thought that I'd have the ambition and the confidence for that? Not to mention that it's not easy to find a group of people you get along with in a business environment. All 5 of us have a wide range of knowledge and abilities, but we share common values and goals, which make us a great team. If you're interested in reading more about what I learned through WISE, I wrote a blog about it on the Grace Hopper blog here.

I am now trying to develop my own vision in hopes of attaining it one day. But I will never forget to give back to my community and I will never forget WISE.

Being a shy connector

It's a new school year, and maybe you're feeling invigorated by all the new faces on campus... but you could also just be totally overwhelmed by the flood of strangers.

My friend Sacha is a self-confessed shy person who is also good at meeting new people, giving presentations... typical extrovert stuff. And she does it all without defeating her shyness, but rather finding ways to connect that don't require her to be outgoing.

Check out her tips on being a shy connector. My favourite tip involves wearing a funny hat (or something else notable) to get people to come up to you and talk, because when I met Sacha I absolutely had to go up to her and ask about her huge camera and tiny computer. It works!

I've embedded her slides below, but it's worth reading her blog post that goes with them, too!

The Shy Connector

View more documents from Sacha Chua.

Welcome back to school for 2009-2010!

That Time I Felt Like an Impostor

From my blog:

What a failure I felt like right then and there. It was as though I'd made it to the thesis portion of my Masters with almost all A+'s, and somehow didn't deserve it. It was as though all the scholarships I'd managed to get throughout my academic career weren't really meant to go to someone like me. I was no researcher - I was an impostor!

Read the whole story!

“Anonymous was a woman”-unknown

This was a quote I found last year and wrote down just because it amused me at the time. Initially I thought it was referring to inventions and ideas from back when a woman’s place was in the home. But Barb and I were running a trivia game for the engineering frosh this week and one of our questions was about men and women being equally skilled in math except that girls had less confidence in their abilities. This got me thinking that a lot of times anonymous is still a woman because a lot of girls are still hesitant about their abilities and don’t step up and share their ideas. Girls still sit in class and try not to get noticed, maybe mutter the answer under their breath or scribble it on their page without raising their hand or shouting out the answer. I’ve even caught myself doing this and I’d say a have a fairly healthy self esteem.

CuWISE has always advertised as offering mentoring and support for current students, any time I hear this my gut reaction is to expect some upper year or grad student genius sitting at a desk with a scared first year or myself trying to get up the courage to ask for help with past experiences causing them to expect to be made to feel inferior. This is by no means always the case or even mostly the case with these types of programs. But I think it’s at least as important if not more so to have a support network including groups of people who don’t set out to be the teacher or mentor but are just there. The groups of students who you can relate to that have gone through and are still going through the same things you are.

I’ve always been shy and if I didn’t really know anyone in class I would go out of my way to have to ask a stranger for help because I always seemed to think that everyone else just got it, that no one else was struggling with material or time management or anything else. It was joining groups like WISE that made me realise that other students were struggling too. It’s the offhand remarks made after events when people are just hanging about that made me realise that I wasn’t alone in my struggles and that it is possible to get through them.

So my advice to all the first year students and everyone else too, is to get involved. Even if WISE is not the group for you, it is your involvement in those not for credit clubs and activities that will make your stay at university memorable and likely play a big role in helping you get through it as well.

I've always felt that I can't name enough famous women

I've always felt that I can't name enough famous women, so I researched them and here they are in the form of a "WISE" trivia game I made for EngFrosh:

Who was the first woman ever to be awarded the Nobel Prize only 2 years after it was founded and 5 years later won another Nobel Prize? Clue: She discovered the elements Radium and Polonium. She was also the first woman to receive a doctorate in Europe. Answer: Marie Curie


Who was the first woman to become United States Secretary of State. Clue: It was during Bill Clinton’s presidency. Answer: Madeleine Albright.



Was the first programmer recorded in history a man or a woman? Clue: Babbage was mentoring this person. Answer: It was a woman, Ada Lovelace



What American biologist was awarded Nobel Prize in 2004 for her work on the genetics of smell, proving that each cell in our nose can only smell one scent? Answer: Linda Buck from USA


Who was one of the first programmers of the Harvard Mark I computer and developed the first compiler for a computer programming language. Clue: A conference, celebrating women in computing, is named after her. WISE executives are attending it for the second time this year. Answer: Grace Hopper

Who is an Academy Award–nominated actress, television producer, literary critic and magazine publisher who is best known for her self-titled, multi-award winning talk show? Clue: Her talk show has become the highest-rated program of its kind in history. Answer: Oprah Winfrey

Who was the world's first female aircraft designer and first woman to graduate from electrical engineering at U of T? Clue: She worked as an aeronautical engineer during the Second World War and did much to make Canada a powerhouse of airplane construction. Answer: Elsie MacGill

What woman won the Nobel Prize in 2008 for discovering the HIV virus? Clue: She is a French virologist. Answer: Francoise Barre-Sinoussi



What woman won the Nobel Prize in 2007 in literature. Clue: She grew up in Africa but was prohibited to enter the country because of her views on the equality of races. Answer: Doris Lessing


Who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979 and India's highest civilian honour for her humanitarian work. Clue: Her Missionaries of Charity continued to expand and at the time of her death it was operating 610 missions in 123 countries. Answer: Mother Teresa

Who is known as the mother of the atomic bomb by discovering nuclear fission? Clue: German version of Marie Curie. Answer: Lise Meitner




Who was the first female senator to represent the US state and the first American First Lady to run for public office? Answer: Hillary Clinton


Who was the first African woman to get a Nobel Prize, which was in 2004? Clue: She founded the Green Belt Movement, an environmental non-governmental organization focused on the planting of trees, environmental conservation, and women's rights. Answer: Wangari Maathai

Which woman is best known for her contributions to the understanding of the fine molecular structures of DNA? Clue: She was an English biophysicist, physicist, chemist, biologist. Answer: Rosalind Franklin

Some Career Tips for Joining the Start-Up Economy

Via ACM CareerNews Alert for Tuesday, February 17, 2009. In the spirit of Barb's post on the entrepreneurial spirit.

Some Career Tips for Joining the Start-Up Economy
Media Post, August 13

While job growth within the broader economy may be stalling, the good news is that we are starting to see a lot of “green-shoot” growth at small companies, especially nimble, fast-moving start-ups. Thus, for IT workers looking for jobs or thinking about career changes, particularly for those in any industry that generally lags the overall economy, the start-up sector is becoming increasingly attractive. With that in mind, the article shares some career tips for those who are considering joining start-up companies.

Success with a new start-up takes much more than desire to work in an exciting and innovative environment. People think that great relationships and a thick Rolodex are keys to success in transitioning from big companies to small, particularly if you are in sales or business development. It's not that simple. When you work for a big company, everybody wants to work with you. When you move to a small firm, the value that you provide is measured by the actual results that you can deliver for customers and partners. This requires really understanding your customers, their needs and your product and obsessing over customer service. You have to ask yourself every day how much real value you created that day, and make yourself essential.

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