Photography credit: CRA
Throughout my career I’ve been fortunate to attend Computer Research Association-Women (opens in new tab) (CRA-W) career mentoring workshops at key moments, including early in graduate school and as a new researcher. The workshops helped me understand my career options, network with amazing female researchers and other graduate students and reassured me I wasn’t the only one figuring out how to manage across a family and work. Oh, and that everyone gets tired of their Ph.D. dissertation topic at some point, but it’s worth it to finish!
Now it’s my privilege to give back and I’m part of Microsoft’s delegation at the CRA-W Graduate Cohort Workshop (opens in new tab), April 13 – 14, 2018. I’m thrilled to work at a company that has sponsored Grad Cohort for 14 years since it began in 2004. All students attend for free, so sponsorship by Microsoft helps bring the students, pay for the logistics of the meeting and everything you need to have a great workshop.
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At the workshop, 400 female graduate students in their first, second, or third years will listen to speakers, attend mentoring lunches, meet other graduate students in their research areas, get one-on-one career mentoring and have many informal chats. I’ll be speaking in two sessions, one covering Balancing Grad School and Personal Life, a great chance to share advice that helped me along the way. In the second, we’ll describe PhD Non-Academic Career Paths and the Job Search. It’s a great time to have a PhD and work in industry so I always enjoy helping students understand the wide array of options they have in the computing field. Together with my Microsoft colleagues, we’ll also staff an informal table where students can stop by to talk and help out at the one-on-one career mentoring sessions.
We are joining more than 25 speakers, across 20 interactive sessions with topics targeted at each cohort of students. The first-year students learn about finding an advisor, networking, the difference between Master’s degrees and PhD. Second year students have sessions on strategies for picking a research topic, presentation strategies, balancing graduate school and personal life, while the third-year students learn about thesis proposals, publishing their research and academic and industry job searches. Plenary sessions with keynote speakers bring us all together.
With my passion for encouraging diversity in computing, I love spending time at Grad Cohort. I’m always inspired by the research I see at the poster sessions, and my chats with students. With two teenagers and a busy work schedule, it’s easy to get distracted by the day-to-day stuff; coming to Grad Cohort gives me a chance to reflect and re-energize through interacting with the students. Sharing my excitement about how I’m turning 12 years of research into reality through my work on Microsoft Cortana (opens in new tab) personal digital assistant reminds me that I have one of the coolest jobs in the world.
If you are coming to Grad Cohort, I hope you’ll come to one of my sessions and say hello and stop by our Microsoft table to introduce yourself and chat about Microsoft and the many ways we support and encourage the participation of women in computing and research. During the workshop, we’ll also be taking photos and you can also check out the CRA-W resource library (opens in new tab) for slides from past graduate cohort events and the 2018 talks after the event.
2018 Event Gallery
Artificial intelligence 
Computer vision 
Human-computer interaction