At a recent (virtual) gathering of friends and colleagues, Sharon Alker asked, “What were you like as a student?” This blog post is an extended response to her question—partly for Sharon and my other faculty friends, partly for my students (particularly one graduating student who I think might gain some insight into our relationship over the last few years), and partly, as always, for myself.*

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My answer, in this conversation, was that I was the kind of student who rarely went to office hours. The first time I went to office hours was in my second semester of second year, when I was taking Algorithm Design and Analysis, and for the first time, encountered a problem I didn’t even know how to begin. (Current CS majors take heed!)

It was a positive experience (thanks, Ran!) and I wish I could say I was a regular in office hours after that. But I wasn’t. Why not?

Even though my dad has a Ph.D., I would say my family of origin has working-class values—particularly industriousness and self-reliance. I did most of my work by myself, unless a course mandated work in teams. I felt like I should not need help, like I was imposing by even asking for help. If I didn’t understand something, I felt it was on me to work harder.

So even in my last two years of college, I’m sure I made an appointment to have a conversation with a professor more times than I went to office hours for help.

These days, I tell my students there are three steps to succeeding in college:

1. Go to class;
2. Do the work;
3. Talk to your professors.

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Mike Erlinger has told me I was a very organized student. I think he’s right. I didn’t always finish all my work, but I usually felt on top of it, and I rarely if ever missed a due date. In my Software Development class, I was the first to finish writing my software components. I stayed up the night before it was due out of solidarity with my team, not because I still had work to do.  (Incidentally, that was the class where I learned I don’t do all-nighters. By 3 am or so, collating copies and eating donuts was about all I was capable of.)

I worked as a student grader for several classes, which in retrospect was a recognition of my organizational skills as well as my mastery of the content.

But I do remember a few times when I did not feel so organized. For example:

• I forgot that my first CS 60 exam was open notes, and I had to run back to my dorm room to get them. Fortunately Harvey Mudd’s campus is small, and I knew exactly where to find the one binder that had all my notes in it.
• I dropped Parallel Computing because I was taking the maximum load of six courses that semester, and I was having nightmares about missing exams and forgetting the assignments. I think Professor Keller was disappointed—he told me I was doing fine—but I was not okay and I needed to drop the class. (Oddly enough, CS 60 was with Professor Keller as well.)

I share the latter story pretty much whenever an advisee approaches me about dropping a class because they are feeling overwhelmed: I get it.

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I did, nonetheless, procrastinate.

I enjoyed my weekends with Brooks; we always had good intentions of getting back to work on Sunday afternoons but rarely got to it before evening. I also enjoyed long dinners at Platt with our circle of friends. (At a round table, there’s always room for n+1!)

Furthermore, I’ve always had a perfectionist streak, which I’m starting to think is one of the reasons I still procrastinate on grading. I know that timeliness of feedback can be more important than quality, but at the same time, mistakes in grading can have real consequences. (That might be a topic for another post.)

As a professor, one of my personal mottos is, “the best is the enemy of the good” (Voltaire). It’s something I need to keep reminding myself of over and over.

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Perhaps because of my organizational skills, I was assigned the role of Team Leader for my senior capstone project team. Looking back now, I suspect I was also assigned this role to ensure my participation in a team where I was the only woman. (More on gender below.)

At the start of my senior year, I did not see myself as a leader, and I was sure this assignment must have been a mistake. Major imposter syndrome here. But I was given a job, and I was determined to do it.

In fact, I was an excellent team leader. Each team meeting started with a clear agenda and ended with action items. I guided my team to develop consensus on interfaces between components, which let us integrate our code in just one day—something I am still amazed by.

I still use those skills today. One aspect of my leadership I am most proud of is my department’s ability to come to consensus on curriculum and policy. And in a LACS meeting just this week, I was told that the role of meeting chair could become a tenured position—that is, I was welcome to chair all future meetings. I laughed and said, “no.”

For current students with similar strengths: If I had decided to go into industry, I probably should have been looking into entry-level project management roles. But those are scarce, so I could also have looked for companies with a reputation for fast promotion into management for software developers with leadership potential.

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I doubt I was especially insightful or brilliant, but I learned quickly and I got things done.

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If I asked my professors what I was like in class, I think they would give very different answers.

• In CS 60 with Prof Keller, I sat in the front of the classroom and paid close attention.  I trusted him, and I didn’t have friends yet that I particularly wanted to sit with.
• I’m pretty sure I sat front and center in Artificial Intelligence, which I took with Margaret Fleck when I was a junior or senior. Margaret is the only woman professor I ever got to take a CS course with as an undergraduate. We’ve since lost touch, but we were close at the time. She disclosed her pregnancy to me before anyone else at Harvey Mudd (and told me so at the time); I invited her to my wedding. I definitely thought of her during my pregnancy. I wonder now if she found it helpful to have my support in the classroom.
• I definitely sat near the front in Theory of Computation with Professor Bull, who has a deliciously dry and crisp sense of humor. We never had an especially close relationship, but I liked him very much.
• In Operating Systems, I sat in the front row and joined my friends Bill and (especially) Drew in heckling Mike throughout each class. I not only trusted Mike, but felt exceptionally safe with him. Mike was probably the most approachable of all my professors at Mudd, despite his seniority. In particular, it was he who I approached when I needed to interview a professor for my course on Women in Science. It’s been a while, but Mike has been one of my informal mentors; in particular, he was among those I consulted when deciding whether to apply for my current position at Whitman.
• In CS 6, my first college CS class, I think I remember sitting in the middle of the classroom. I loved Ran, and I arrived to class early, so I would not have taken a seat near the edge of the room out of consideration to later-arriving students. But like many of my classmates, I was rather in awe of Ran—and remained so until I finally grew out of it about a year ago.
• In some other CS classes, I didn’t feel that sense of trust, liking, or welcome. I sat in the back and tried to fade into the woodwork. This includes one class where I know I was the only woman student, and a couple more where I’m pretty sure I was. One professor was not especially supportive, and another was outright hostile.

In classes where I felt safe and self-confident, I was probably a bit of a show-off. I enjoyed the attention of my professors, and I wanted to test my understanding in real time. I don’t think I was particularly considerate of my classmates. (Upon further reflection, I fully expect one of my professors to reply and tell me this is the understatement of the century.)

As a CS professor now, this is a trait I see more often in male students than in women, though not universally. I think that as a student I was not really aware of the gender dynamics at a conscious level, which may have worked to my benefit.

I’m still like this in contexts where I am in the student role, such as professional development workshops. I remember one public lecture at Grinnell where the speaker gave me a broad wink after I raised my hand one time too many, and I felt both honored and chagrined.

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I was, of course, a nerdy student. I loved the jokes in Ran’s lectures. While I didn’t get all the pop culture references, I still appreciated them: for example, thanks to the appearance of Hans und Franz I will never forget the Pumping Lemma, even though I have never watched a complete episode of Saturday Night Live. I did get the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy references, particularly the frequent appearance of the number 42. And I first saw this oldie-but-goodie in CS 6:

As a professor, I think there’s a double-edged sword here. There is value in enculturating students to computer science: this cultural capital certainly helped me fit in with my classmates in grad school. (One of the things I loved best about being a CSE grad student at the University of Washington is the long tradition of parody skits performed by both grad students and faculty at the annual holiday party.) And Ran’s jokes helped me feel included and cared for. (I suppose humor is one of my love languages). But on the other hand, there is some risk of making students who don’t share nerdy interests or knowledge feel needlessly excluded, and that often includes those with historically marginalized identities.

So I’ve tended to tell jokes that depend on CS content. I’ve tried to stay away from nerd culture references, or at least make them subtle, so a student who missed it might not realize there was anything to miss. Oddly enough, remote teaching this semester is making me reconsider this. I’ve been letting my nerd flag fly in an effort to build connections with students, make concepts more memorable, and provide a little more fun in our days (mine included). I’m looking forward to figuring out how I want to approach this in my return to the classroom this fall.

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I found my people in college. I was Valedictorian of my high school, and even though the bullying got better over time, I was still stereotyped as “the smart one” and felt apart from my classmates. I went to Harvey Mudd because, even on my prospective student visit (where I met Brooks), I felt more at home there than I did at my high school. At Mudd, some of my best friends were smarter than me, and I felt safe letting my nerd flag fly.

Mudd’s humor is part of that. I know I’m not the only Mudder who was attracted to apply by the Junk Mail campaign.

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I was an earnest student, and I was young and idealistic. I remember my older friend Sam Mikes (two years older! so worldly-wise!) telling me, “A cynic is a disappointed idealist.” Obviously it’s stuck with me ever since, as I teeter-totter between cynicism and idealism.

For one example, when I was a student the Registrar implemented a policy change in which students would be assigned a timeslot based on their last name, rather than random permutation. I remember going into one of Ran’s classes in tears because it was so unfair that students with names in the middle of the alphabet, like me (I was Janet Newman then), didn’t have a chance at an early registration time until senior year when it hardly mattered. I think Ran spoke up on my behalf, and the policy change was soon reversed. I now wonder if this event was an unconscious factor in my attraction to work on ethics of technology design.

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Computer scientists have a saying about design tradeoffs: “X, Y, Z, choose two out of three.” I was an excellent student and I had a rich social life, but continuing a trend from high school, I was never involved in performing arts, sports, student activities, or student government. When Brooks and I got married before my senior year, I moved off-campus with him and became even less involved in happenings on campus.

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Returning to the beginning, I wasn’t planning on a CS major when I started college. I wanted to be a real scientist, which to me meant studying physics. I soon discovered that while I loved reading books about physics, I have very little intuition for Newtonian mechanics, I don’t like continuous math, and labs are exhausting. (I had Friday afternoon labs both semesters of my first year, and that was particularly exhausting.) On the other hand, I always did my CS 6 homework early—well before the deadline—and I did all the extra credit. I changed my major to CS in my first semester, after Brooks pointed this out to me.

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And wrapping up with the end of college, I wasn’t planning on grad school, either. Though if I wanted to be a real scientist, I should have been planning on it all along. I was pretty clueless despite my dad’s advanced degree.

I decided to apply to grad school because I hated my internship at Microsoft. The irony of my current title, Microsoft Chair of Computer Science, has not escaped me. The best revenge is living well?

At Microsoft I felt lonely and incompetent, partially due to my own lack of assertiveness, but mostly due to The Patriarchy. I was the only woman in an environment that did not acknowledge that fact or help me to negotiate it, and it was alienating on so many levels. I’ve been overjoyed to learn that my women students who’ve worked at Microsoft since then have had much better experiences than I did.

By contrast, I loved school and I was good at it. I did feel a bit lonely in my summer research project with Ran: I was not assertive about visiting him, and if I have the history right he was preoccupied with the birth of his first child. But I learned a lot, I liked my teammates, I enjoyed the flexibility of our work schedule, and I got my first publication out of it.

I didn’t realize how different from college grad school was going to be, and I didn’t talk to my professors enough to find out. But that’s a story for another time.

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*This blog post was written as a break/reward in between grading quizzes. I need to remember this as a strategy for the future.