07w5030 Mentoring for Engineering Academia II

Arriving Sunday, July 22 and departing Friday, July 27, 2007

Organizers: Robert Gray (Stanford University), Sheila Hemami (Cornell University), Eve Riskin (University of Washington), Rabab Ward (University of British Columbia).

Confirmed Participants

Press Release: Engineering Students and Faculty Strategize for Academic Success

Information for Participants

Schedule and Abstracts (PDF file)

Final Report (PDF file)

Objectives

As with the original workshop, this one will have two primary goals:

(1) helping the participants be more effective both locally and globally in improving the environment and diversity of faculty in engineering and related disciplines, and

(2) producing a book distilling the ideas generated at the workshop which will be useful to colleagues as well as to review panels and visiting committees charged with evaluating institutional progress and recommending potential improvements.

The relevance and importance are amply illustrated by the pressing national needs for trained technical talent and the implicit need for enlarging the pool of trained, talented members of the profession. The issues will remain timely until the population in the engineering professions better reflects the population in general, as has happened in biology, law, and medicine.

The primary objective of the workshop will be the development and documentation of ideas on how to mentor students, colleagues, and academic administrators on issues relating to academic careers in engineering and related disciplines with an emphasis on issues relating to women faculty in electrical engineering and computer science. Specifically, the workshop participants will discuss, distill, and document methods to

-mentor students on pursuing a successful academic career of teaching, research, and leadership,

-mentor academic colleagues on (1) seeking genuinely open and fair searches which actively seek and recruit a wide diversity of applicants, (2) working for a supportive and cooperative environment in which junior faculty can thrive and advance, (3) helping recently tenured mid-career faculty plan the next stages of their career, and (4) encouraging and assisting junior and mid-career faculty to consider roles in academic adminstration.

-mentor academic administrators on providing adequate support for individual students and student organizations

Unlike the first workshop, this workshop will invite faculty from non PhD-granting institutions and undergraduate students. Such institutions contribute to the pool of graduate students at the PhD-granting institutions and their faculty have a different perspective both on their own career and on their preparation of students.

Each session will begin with a few short presentations to initiate discussion. Most of the time will be spent in discussion with a scribe taking notes and a session chair charged to produce a collection of "bullets" of recommendations along with key discussion points and suggestions for supporting evidence or research. As with many review panels and visiting committees for institutions, the session chairs and scribes will be charged with drafting a written document capturing the highlights of the session. The final day of the workshop will be devoted to refining the documents and merging them into a single draft report. During the latter part of the meeting and during subsequent months, the organizing committee will become an editorial committee with the co-organizers as "editors-in-chief" to prepare successive refinements of the document and circulate it among all participants. The final document will be made freely available on the web as both pdf and html files and, if funds can be found, the final proceedings will be published as a paperback book as was done for the first workshop.

If the proposal for a BIRS workshop is accepted, the co-organizers and the organizing committee will seek funding from other sources to provide travel support for participants who require it, especially students and faculty from small schools with limited funding. Small schools and schools which traditionally serve underrepresented minorities will be given the highest priority for such travel funds. Possible sources include the US NSF Broadening Participation in Computing (BPC) Program and the US NSF Human Resources Development (HRD) division, which administrates the PAESMEM program.