Introduce a Girl to Engineering Days

[yesthattom]

[I've been meaning to post this a for a week or so.]

I participated in Google's Introduce A Girl to Engineering Week. This is part of National Engineers Week, Feb 19-25, 2006, which designated Feb 23 to be Introduce a Girl To Engineering Day. Google had three days (I believe) where groups of girls from local middle and high schools who spent the day at Google taking tours, getting product demos, and watching presentations about various engineering topics.

I got to tour 10 girls from 5 different local schools around the Mountain View campus on Wednesday. It was interesting to modify the standard tour given to adult engineering candidates to instead be appropriate for highschool girls. Some memorable moments:

• Someone asked why everyone has two computers on their desk, pointing at the two huge monitors each engineer hasa. I pointed out that everyone has one computer but two big monitors "so we can open lots of windows". They swooned.
• "Do you have to know everything about computers to work at Google?" I pointed out that we hire a lot of non-computer people... lawyers, salespeople, artists, etc. ... and expect everyone to know something about computers. But yes, our programers are expected to know a lot about computers.
• "What should I do if I want to become a great engineer?"

This last question gave me pause. What does make a great engineer? Or, more specifically, what can I draw from my experience and pass on to someone that is less than half my age? It's a deep, important question that completely caught me off-guard. So I said,

• Be curious. Don't just answer the question, be curious about the whole system.
• Study hard. But at the end of the chapter when they have those "extra" bits that you don't have to read? Read them. Read the chapters that aren't going to be on the test.

Then I paused because I realized I had just said fairly generic, stupid advice. So I paused and thought for a moment and realized that what I should be telling them is to fight the forces that keep girls from becoming women engineers.

"But most importantly," I said...

• If you ask a computer question and someone says, "let me show you how", don't let them take the keyboard away from you. You learn best by doing it yourself.
• Don't ask someone for the answer, ask where to find the answer. By looking up something yourself you learn how to do research. When someone tells you an answer you miss out on all the fun things you'll find by accident on the path to finding the answer.
• Believe in yourself. You are a lot smarter than you ever realize, and smarter than anyone else will tell you.

If you are a woman interested in working at Google, you might want to watch this video about working at Google.

Comments

[kimuchi.livejournal.com]

Sounds like you gave a great tour and talk.

Whoa, that video reinforces my impression that I'm not girlie enough for Google.

[vito-excalibur.livejournal.com]

Those are some great answers. And it's not that those answers are so hard to come up with - it's that it's so effective when someone else tells you it's ok to do that. Good on you.

[rmd.livejournal.com]

we had a program like that for local girls from low income schools at the borg. we took them on a tour of the noc, talked about what we did, chatted them up, and fed them lunch. the fact that a starting noc analyst (requirement: ccna) made a *whole* lot more than a beautician was not lost on them.

[porcinea.livejournal.com]

Thank you!! That was excellent advice you gave those girls.

[sweh.livejournal.com]

When somone asks me a similar question I tell them to play with the system. Don't be afraid of breaking your own machine (get a cheap second hand one, if you feel safer). Fixing the problems you cause will teach you lots of stuff as well. Of course, don't do this on other people's machines. :-)

[stitchinthyme.livejournal.com]

Very cool. But the cynical side of me is thinking: So when are the "men's rights" people going to start whining about how there's no "Introduce a Boy to Engineering" event and totally ignore the original intent of the whole thing -- to empower young girls and encourage them to choose nontraditional careers -- as has happened with "Take your daughter to work day"?

[yesthattom.livejournal.com]

Did you see the end of the video when one of the founders talks?

[stitchinthyme.livejournal.com]

Didn't watch it yet -- I'm at work and too lazy to put on headphones. :-)

[stitchinthyme.livejournal.com]

Okay, I watched it, but I don't see what you're getting at...

[yesthattom.livejournal.com]

Just that the founders are very much in favor of this kind of thing. When AT&T would make videos like that the CEO would come on an say something so generic that he could have been speaking to any topic. This guy pointed out that he wears heels :-)

[tigerrrcat.livejournal.com]

That was a bit silly, though, wasn't it? I mean, lots of women don't wear or care about "heels". Particularly women in computing. As soon as the Director of Engineering said the most important question was .... shoes ... they'd lost me. No matter how girlie I get, I would never think that the most important question to a CEO was "shoes". Fsck that. I'd rather know how he feels about having such a large company. Whether he's worried that the culture he fostered will wither or go rogue. You know - stuff that's interesting because he is the CEO of Google.

[yesthattom.livejournal.com]

yes, it was silly.

[cyan-blue.livejournal.com]

I like this bit especially:

If you ask a computer question and someone says, "let me show you how", don't let them take the keyboard away from you. You learn best by doing it yourself.

[jenniever.livejournal.com]

It seems kind of odd to me that Google would push for women. I mean, it makes sense, I suppose, considering that the industry is still pretty heavy on the men. But still, I didn't know how to feel about a gender-specific recruiting video. The industry, in general, is kind of odd when it comes to women - there are certain jobs that seem to attract more women than others. I love my jobs in tech support - I like taking shit apart and then explaining it in nice words to the end-user, but I'm inevitably on all-male teams. Come to think of it, I have yet to work on a tech support team with another woman (I'm counting Drew's helpdesk as an exception since the call center had plenty of women, but I was the only girl on Network shifts). And yet, I know more than a few woman software engineers.


I don't know what I'm getting at, and whatever it is, it doesn't belong fleshed out in a LJ comment. For some reason, it all just leaves me with a weird feeling. Good points to the girls on the tour, though! I wish I could post those on my office door at work.