Feminine Geeks and the Industry Night

A couple of Fridays ago, I woke up earlier than usual for my 8am class and took the time to decide what to wear.

Now, with this sentence, you may accuse me of being ‘such a girl‘ – stereotyped in the engineering world as someone who gets excited about pretty shoes and dresses, rather than fixing the code that suddenly stopped working properly last night. The truth is, I am a girl and proud to be one in engineering that doesn’t quite fit the stereotypical character in people’s mind as an engineer. Indeed, I do love pretty shoes and dresses, but I also do occasionally wake up in the morning thinking about the MATLAB simulink model that didn’t quite work right the night before. Many people in North America seem to have a hard time putting the words ‘feminine’ and ‘geek’ together into the description of one person.

So, why the sudden talk about women in engineering?
Well, on that Friday, MEGA(Mech Eng Grad Association) and graduate student groups from ECE and CS jointly held anIndustry Night event (UBC 2010 Industry/Student Networking Night) where students and local engineering company representatives were given the opportunity to mingle / network over hors d’œuvres and drinks. This highly successful event, like many other occasions, was not an exception to my encounter of surprised looks in people’s faces when I say that I am in Engineering.

Jeswin, AJung(myself), Navid, and Eric (from left to right) at the Industry Night event

Why are people be so surprised? Why can’t people accept the idea that an engineer can be feminine, socially apt, nerdy and geeky at the same time? It’s actually interesting how I can impress people more easily than my guy friends when talking about simple engineering concepts to people. I think it’s all just the results of false stereotyping. I mean, I am a feminist, and hence, probably highly biased. But it’s a fact that some of the brightest classmates from my undergrad (Mechatronics) at the University of Waterloo were girls – I think my former classmates can definitely agree with that. In addition, the chair of the Department was, and still is, a highly respected female engineer (Dr. Pearl Sullivan – a proud alumni of UBC Mech by the way).

Female presence at UBC Mech isn’t very different either. There’s Dr. Elizabeth Croft (my supervisor) who is an NSERC Chair, and even better, there’s the Dean of the Faculty of Applied Science, Dr. Tyseer Aboulnasr, both of whom are mother of three children and obviously highly established engineers. And feminine side of female engineers tend to work as strengths rather than weaknesses. I mean, my interests in cute shoes pay off as ‘being presentable’ at networking-esque events, and taking on charity initiatives to support a child abroad (supposedly the caring/motherly?? side of me) helped me develop leadership skills. And hey, my undergrad classmate, Erin Antcliffe, is currently working in Ghana for the Engineers Without Borders and using her own combination of “feminine & engineering” to make a difference in the world (check out some of her initiatives on her blog, or support her work here). I really don’t see why female and engineering are seen as oil and water to people to this day, while the same people consider male and engineering as some hydrophilic substance and water.

The above-mentioned and many other female engineers form a strong argument as to why people shouldn’t be so surprised anymore to come across engineers who are girls. It’s just sad to see that the surprised looks haven’t quite faded away yet.

So I am a support of initiatives that build a fresher and more flexible picture of what an engineer really looks like in today’s world. You can totally accuse me of being a feminist, but I think Mattel Inc., the company that makes Barbie dolls, is doing the right thing in the newest Barbie dolls, such as the Computer Engineer Barbie (see picture). The Barbie in an office cubicle apparently has a dual monitor setup, a pink netbook, and a laptop with Linux on it. They even have an online puzzle game on their Barbie website called ‘I can be a computer engineer’. I think this is totally awesome, and I shall remain patient until they get around to making a Roboticist Barbie.

Computer Engineer Barbie

UBC ELECTRICAL AND COMPUTER ENGINEERING PRESENTS THE 2010 INDUSTRY/STUDENT NETWORKING NIGHT

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Hello there!

I suppose introductions are in order. My name is Kristy and I will be one of the contributors to iMech this year. I’ve never written a blog, or done much writing that isn’t point form recently in fact, so you’ll have to bear with me as I try to get into the groove of full sentences. 🙂

UBC and I go way back. I did my Undergrad here in the Mech department, graduated in 2009, and started my Masters this past September. I never really thought I would do my Masters, so quickly after my undergrad anyway, but life is interesting that way and here I am and enjoying it! (See proof below).

A lot of different areas of mechanical engineering interest me, but I am most interested in medical device design which is the subject of my thesis project (of which I’m sure many more entries will follow!).

I look forward to writing about my experiences through this program! Please feel free to contract me anytime with any questions or comments at kwiens@mech.ubc.ca, and I look forward to getting to e-know you.

UBC Mech Grad meets ASME

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Last week, the City of Vancouver had the honour of welcoming the attendees of ASME (American Society of Mechanical Engineer) IMECE (International Mechanical Engineering Congress & Exposition) at the Vancouver Convention Centre (see pictures below). From what I hear, it was the first time IMECE, one of the largest mech eng conferences in the world, was held outside of the United States, and I definitely don’t think anyone can blame anyone for their excellent choice of venue (I always wanted to see the rotating Earth in the Convention Centre up close). Now, the reason why I am writing about the conference today is because I got to attend the conference for free as a student volunteer. That’s right, $0 registration fee.

Photo of Vancouver Convention Centre by Wook Choi, attendee of IMECE 2010 and phD candidate from UCLA

Now, I love going to conferences. I think it’s more fun than just visiting another city/country/continent for a trip. I’ve been to a handful of conferences since my undergrad – leadership conferences, student tech conferences, etc., – and I even chose to go to Japan for my grad trip a bit more than a year ago, because ICRA (International Conference on Robotics and Automation) 2009 was held in Kobe, Japan at the time.

I think being financially supported to attend conferences is definitely one of the sunny sides of being in grad school. You get to fly out, train out, or bus out to somewhere (possibly new) to meet people from all over the place who shares the same interest as you. It doesn’t matter if you’ve never met these people before, or you’re nervous to death that the researcher (one of the persons you’ve only seen the online profile picture of) just came and sat in the room you’ll be giving your presentation in.

Just like teenagers who, by chance, run into his/her favourite movie star, grad students experience theses starstruck moments when they meet certain big figures in their research field. I certainly did when I went to ICRA 2009, and talked with the big figures in the field of roboethics, and went to ICRA 2010 and gave my workshop presentation in front of a researcher I had been admiring for over a year. During the first semester (and perhaps the first year) of my master’s I flipped through a lot of pdf’s (academic papers, of course) related to my research. It was inevitable – as is the case with any student researchers in any field of study – that I came across certain researchers’ names more often than others’. And for some reason, I started to consider them as Einstein or Newton – both of whom have passed away long ago, but left us with invaluable knowledge we now can’t live without, especially as engineers – and couldn’t imagine that these people could exist in the same room as you and talk to you in person, one on one …. for minutes… and even ask you questions that only you know the answer to…!! The thrill, I tell ya…

Anywho, long story short, I have fond memories of running into the big figures and being starstruck. With this and many other factors in mind, I love going to conferences.

Photo of Vancouver Convention Centre by Wook Choi, attendee of IMECE 2010 and phD candidate from UCLA

In preparation for the IMECE conference, UBC students were offered to volunteer at the conference and, in exchange for the volunteering work, allowed to attend the conference for the day for free. Myself and a handful of Mech grads volunteered for the conference. I volunteered on Wednesday and Thursday of last week, checking on and helping out presenters with their posters etc,. I got to meet a lot of people from all over the world from my volunteering duties. Most of them were researchers within micro and nano area, which are quite different from my field – robotics, human-robot interaction, and roboethics. But it was great to have met them, and with the power of social media, will try my best to keep in touch with them. Who knows? I might end up presenting something in Atlanta, or LA, and may run into the people from Georgia Tech, UCLA, USC etc. again?

Another awesome thing about volunteering at the conference (in addition to free food, which I didn’t mention so far) was that Dr. Sheldon Green, the Head of our Department, was there as a ‘student’ volunteer on Thursday as well. I think ASME needed a lot of volunteers for this conference, and Dr. Green came out to volunteer with the students and promote UBC student volunteerism at the conference. He was actually given a name tag that said ‘STUDENT’ in all caps under his name. He didn’t seem offended by the misprint at all, and joined us early in the morning to get volunteering instructions for the day. I think the students who woke up around 6am to get to the Vancouver Convention Centre by 7am, and Jennifer Pelletier (a.k.a, Jen), who was there before us and left the Centre after us everyday of the conference, were all enspirited by Dr. Green’s volunteerism (and also by his self-control over nanaimo bars at lunch – the self-control I definitely did not have).

Definitely looking forward to the next conference in my calendar… 🙂