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1) current career position:
I am an electrical engineer. I am currently Vice President of a
small, exciting IC design consulting company. Our company has only
10 employees, and all of us also do design work, including myself
and the president of the company. We design chips, also known as
Integrated Circuits (ICs), semiconductors, micro-chips, etc. for
a variety of applications, depending on what our customers hire
us to design. I have designed chips that go in cell phones, cars,
computers and many other things. The kinds of designs I work on
include both analog and digital, as well as a combination of both.
The job includes designing the circuits by use of computers as well
as doing lots of math with paper and pencil, drawing the circuits
and the graphical layout on a computer, defining and directing the
manufacture of the devices, and then testing the result after the
chip has been manufactured, by working in a laboratory with all
kinds of test equipment and microscopes.
2) education:
After high school (where I loved my math courses the most) I
went to college at Brown University to study engineering. I wasn't
sure what kind of engineering I liked best, but ended up feeling
more connected to electronics than anything else. I graduated in
1981. After I got my bachelor's degree, I worked for several years
before I decided to go back to school part time, at night, one night
a week, to work on getting a master's degree. I eventually got that
degree from the University of New Hampshire (UNH) in 1998.
3) the most exciting part of your career:
The most exciting part of my job is creating something real,
out of something that was just an idea. It is so exciting and amazing
to think about how some new thing might work, to start drawing pictures
and doing some math, and after a while (and often a lot of work)
you ultimately can hold in your hands this little amazing thing
that actually does just what you hoped it would do. What can be
very exciting to me is to see that math really works, and it has
real meaning, and it does great things if you know how to use it.
4) the toughest barriers to overcome to arrive at your current
position:
I have been very lucky and have not experienced any significant
discrimination or harassment in the workplace. I have worked at
several different companies, some of whom treat their employees
better than others. I have luckily worked with some great, smart,
nice people over the years, and our teamwork has resulted in respect
and career advancement opportunities. One barrier I probably did
face was my own expectation of myself. After I realized that I could
do as good a job as the other "guys," my self confidence
allowed me to try to do things that I wasn't so sure I could do.
It can feel risky to try to do things you have never done before.
But taking the risk and challenging yourself also has great potential
rewards. It is amazing what you really can do, if you give it a
shot and believe in yourself. Right now, although it is not a barrier
to me, the one thing that bothers me about my work is that I am
the only woman electrical design engineer that I have ever worked
with, in the 20 years that I've done this kind of work. I don't
know why other women don't do this. It's fun and rewarding. I hope
that things change, and that there are lots of girls out there who
will give it a go, and maybe find themselves in a wonderful career.
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