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| July 2008 | Subscribe |
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In This Issue:
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II. Congressional Hotline |
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BUDGET TALK: SCIENCEFY08 Supplemental: After months of disagreement between the House and the Senate, an agreement was finally reached and is headed to President Bush's desk. President Bush has said that he will sign the bill, which will: allow the layoffs at the federal energy laboratories to be reversed; triple spending for the Robert Noyce Teacher Scholarships; expand tuition benefits for veterans. The breakdown of funds for the science agencies would be the following: $150-million for NIH, $62.5-million for DOE-Science, $62.5-million for NASA, and $62.5-million for the NSF. FY09 Appropriations: While debate is still continuing regarding the FY09 budget, the House and Senate may be coming closer to some agreements. Both the Senate Appropriations Committee and its counterpart in the House have agreed to give the NSF a $6.9 billion budget for the fiscal year 2009 - that would be a 13.87% increase from 2008. It has yet to pass in the Senate. HIGHER EDUCATION ACT EXTENSION PASSEDThe president, on May 30, signed into act a temporary extension of the Higher Education Act (HEA) of 1965, through June 30, 2008. While no major agreements have come forth, this renewal was done in order to give more time to the House and the Senate to reconcile differences between their two versions of the bill. On June 26, Congress approved yet another one-month extension, this time until July 31, 2008. It's awaiting President Bush's authorization. The extra month allows for negotiations to continue between the House and the Senate.
INCREASE FOR ENERGY RESEARCH?The Senate Appropriations Subcommittee this month approved an energy bill that if passed by the Senate, would see a 16 percent increase in energy research funding for FY09. While this is a positive step forward, the bill is less than a version passed by the House. STEM EDUCATION UPDATEThe past few weeks have seen Congress begin the appropriations process for both the National Science Foundation and the Department of Education. So far both the Senate and the House Appropriation Committees have advanced bills that include funding for STEM education. However, the current view from the Hill is quite gloomy, with many observers saying that regardless of these initial bills, it's unlikely either agency will get funds for STEM education. |
III. Teaching Toolbox |
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A Chair in your FutureBy Barbara Mathias-Riegel Why are there so few women at the top?There are times when numbers and percentages speak volumes. As reported in the Profiles of Engineering and Engineering Technology Colleges, published by the American Society for Engineering Education, the percentage of women who are full professors in engineering stands at just over 5 percent. The highest percentage of female faculty is at the assistant professor level. Assistant professors are typically untenured and have little job security or ability to change the culture of their departments.
So what is stopping women faculty from gaining higher positions, such as tenure, full professor, chair, or even dean? The problem is a complex mix of cultural and organizational barriers that some say will take decades to dissolve. A lack of connections and professional acknowledgment is one thing that can hold a woman back. A common complaint is that when it comes to hiring and promoting, the men on the faculty are the majority and they have their "old-boy network," while the women, whose numbers are considerably smaller, are isolated. As one woman professor put it, "When there are only two of us [women] we don't sit around discussing who should get the promotion." One influential academic position held by few women is department chair. Debbi Niemeier, professor and chair for the department of civil and environmental engineering at the University of California-Davis, says that–considering the chair's crucial role in making committee, teaching, and space assignments, deciding on salary and budgets, and "setting the climate" within the department–the importance of having women chairs cannot be overemphasized. Niemeier dubs chairs the "guild masters elected by their peers, most of whom are men." According to Niemeier, the latest data from Research 1 universities shows that there are nine women chairs out of 150 engineering departments. "Women," she says, "will bring new energy and a personal investment in issues of parity to the role of department chair. In addition, they can serve as significant role models to both younger faculty and students aspiring to achieve leadership positions both within and outside the university." Women faculty members are ready to take an active leadership role in their departments. "Women want to have a positive impact," says Maria Klawe, dean of Princeton's School of Engineering and Applied Science. "They've been trained to care about their community, to have a broader perspective than just their personal success. Often they spend a lot of time doing this kind of thing without getting the reward. If you spend a lot of time working on departmental problems and wishing you had a higher position to get it taken care of, well that's a clue."
Another thing hindering women's ascent to higher positions is their reluctance to tout their accomplishments. "We are, as young women and as girls, given a strong message that it's not appropriate to promote yourself," Klawe says. "I've seen younger women who have to sit on themselves to avoid antagonizing people because they are so outspoken. By graduate school they have already learned that being outspoken is not going to get you anywhere. This is not a male versus female thing; it's culture." THINK DIFFERENTWhen Tresa Pollock, professor in the materials science and engineering department at the University of Michigan, was asked by her dean to assess the status of women faculty in the college of engineering, she was surprised at the strong message that came from the women who were tenured and were looking forward to what's next. "We heard at the associate, mid-career level that the women were interested in leadership positions, but they felt that nobody was thinking of them in that way. "We've had a woman provost, and now a president," Pollock continues, "but the reality of the situation is that leadership is not necessarily being developed within."
As a result of the assessment at Michigan, Pollock organized a University of Michigan Women in Science & Engineering Leadership Retreat, in which women deans and chairs from several universities talked about the benefits and barriers of career moves. It was followed by several smaller workshops that focused on communication skills and negotiating, and different styles of management among people with Ph.D.'s in science. Even with all that attention, the imbalance between men and women faculty members still holds in many schools. When Pollock headed the last search committee for the chair of her department, she says they were unsuccessful at finding women candidates to even interview. "We tried. But those that we thought would be good at it just weren't movable. That's not completely surprising because it's pretty well known that women are more likely to have 'two-body' problems–family and job." Indeed, it's commonly said that a woman in leadership, whether she's a dean or a chair, either has to have a husband who's a saint, or a stay-at-home spouse, or she has to be paid well enough to afford good childcare. It's not surprising, then, that a good percentage of the women in leadership positions have children who are older, and/or husbands who are retired. Leadership positions for women not only take a lot of time away from family but from research as well, unless they are highly disciplined. According to Klawe, if a woman moves into a leadership position too early in her career, it's hard to go back to research. She advises women to hang onto their research as long as they can. In 2000, when Judy Vance, at that time an associate professor in mechanical engineering at Iowa State, participated in a NSF-sponsored Women Engineering Leadership Conference in Winter Park, Colo., it planted the seed to change her career. Three years later, after promotion to full professor, her department announced a chair search; Vance threw her hat in the ring and won, thus becoming the first woman to be named a permanent chair of an engineering department at Iowa State. "I was looking to be full professor, and I never thought of being a chair. I don't know if I would have given it consideration if I hadn't gone to the conference," Vance recalls. "It wasn't reticence, it just hadn't occurred to me, and that's the shocking thing–women don't realize they are ready for it."
Another discouraging factor for women is the pressure of the job, Vance notes. "A chair gets pushed from the bottom from the faculty, and pushed from the top from the dean. So people think, 'Why would I want to do that?' They need to know how being a chair helps the school, other women, and the program or department. You don't have as much opportunity as a full professor." Vance says that women are more likely to jump from full professor to assistant or associate dean, without ever being a chair, thus missing a crucial step and "knocking down" chances for further job opportunities or promotion to dean. "Selection committees, and the power at the university for hiring deans, is still very male dominated, and these committees use their own metrics to select the nominees they want to interview. My experience has shown that having chaired a department is a key piece of background needed for qualifying to be a dean candidate. And if you can't even make the candidate set, you will never be dean." All this is not to underestimate the importance of women in associate and full professorships. As one recent study conducted by Donna J. Nelson, a chemistry professor at the University of Oklahoma, noted, a cycle is perpetuated when there are not enough women professors to serve as role models. "Female students," Nelson says, "aren't the only ones affected by the lack of female faculty on campus. Male students are also harmed because they are deprived of access to talented faculty who could be their mentors. In addition, the absence of women sends a message to men that women do not belong in these nontraditional environments and it is acceptable for them to be marginalized, denied tenure, and given unequal resources." Princeton's Klawe fully agrees that when women are leaders in science and engineering, things get better for everyone, including the men. "We want to make sure faculty members get all the information, and everyone is offered the same information." With so many deeply seated problems in our culture and in the way male-dominated faculties operate within, is there any hope for the women who want to move ahead in academia? Pollock believes it can happen, but insists that in addition to hiring women, the focus has to be on retaining them; otherwise women will never have enough in numbers to be heard. "Until you reach some critical mass, these problems are always going to exist. If 30 percent of your faculty were women, a lot of these things would become less problematic," she says. |
IV. JEE Selects |
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The "Random Madness" of WorkBy James Trevelyan Engineers spend more time talking than doing. Success requires social skills as much as expertise.
It is astonishing that at the start of the 21st century we still only have a tiny handful of systematically researched accounts of engineering practice beyond a few glamorous aspects of design. What do engineers and technologists really do in their work? How does engineering really happen? The pattern emerging from our research is that engineering is as much a social discipline as a technical one. Whether it is writing software for a mobile phone or planning more efficient maintenance schedules, engineering work has little intrinsic value until it has passed through the hands of many other people. Yet this reality seems to be almost invisible in our current engineering education curricula. Since 2004, my colleagues and I have interviewed more than 120 engineers–mainly in Australia but also in other countries–and followed those with field observations and rigorous qualitative analysis. I noticed engineers doing lots of coordination in which hard technical knowledge is inextricably bound up with "soft skills" and understanding of human behavior. It is time-consuming, and most don't see it as engineering work. After countless phone calls chasing up suppliers, contractors, colleagues and clients, an engineer would often say something like, "Now I can get down to some real engineering work at last!" Yet this coordination is essential to get results. Here's a sample response to what a typical day or working week involves: "Wednesdays were our meeting day on site...The rest would be just random madness, really." Technical coordination is working with and influencing other people so they willingly and conscientiously perform some necessary work to an agreed schedule. It may simply be asking a colleague to search for data, persuading a client to sign off on design specifications or chasing up a contractor to supply some component samples. Technical coordination usually starts by negotiating what has to be done and when, mostly without any formal authority. Most of the effort goes into following up, preferably face to face, to see if the work is turning out as expected and spotting misunderstandings early enough for corrections to be made. Time constraints will often force compromises, and choosing where and how to compromise relies on accurately predicting the social, technical and commercial consequences. Choosing appropriate follow-up intervals is critical. At the end, careful checking is needed to make sure no further work or rectification is needed.
The big surprise was that technical coordination seems to be the most prominent aspect of engineering practice. Next came formal engineering processes like project management, followed by tasks such as inspection, testing, checking and review. Creative technical work, design and calculations were fourth, followed by procurement, business development and personal career development. My colleagues and I are all "insiders" with extensive engineering work experience. This makes it easier to comprehend the language and the invisible currency of engineering: technical knowledge and understanding. Much of that is tacit, unwritten, passed on verbally and through practice from one generation of engineers to another–that magic stuff called "experience." This research has been incredibly rewarding for my teaching. Gaining detailed knowledge of engineering practice through systematic research provides much greater credibility when explaining the relevance of course material to students. My students use a reduced version of our research interviews to help them learn about engineering practice. Technical coordination does not seem to come naturally to many students, and poor team project performance may be associated with this weakness. We have observed similar weaknesses in many areas of engineering practice. Although project work provides a useful setting for students to learn effective coordination skills, it is not sufficient. Formal instruction and performance monitoring is needed as well. Soft skills are often taught separately from technical course work. This research suggests that soft skills have to be combined with technical expertise for effective coordination. Professor James Trevelyan, discipline chair for mechatronics at the University of Western Australia, teaches sustainability and professional engineering skills. Adapted from July 2007 JEE article Technical Coordination in Engineering Practice. |
V. Fellowship/Scholarship Programs |
PostdoctoralThe Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) Postdoctoral Fellowship Program. This program is open to U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents and offers a competitive stipend as well as insurance, relocation, and travel allowances. The program offers one to three-year postdoctoral fellowships designed to increase the involvement of scientists and engineers from academia and industry to scientific and technical areas of interest and relevance to the Navy. The program has a rolling admission. Go to: http://www.asee.org/nrl/. |
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