Mentor project passes muster

By Joseph O'Rourke

The Computing Research Association's Distributed Mentor Project has passed a milestone. After initial funding for two years, the National Science Foundation recently agreed to renew its funding for three additional years. Proposed by the CRA Committee on the Status of Women in Computing Research (CRAW) in 1993, the project was funded by NSF's Computer and Information Sciences and Engineering (CISE) Directorate for two years, with a total of $286,000.1

This generous support permitted CRAW in 1994 and 1995 to support 53 female undergraduate computer science and engineering (CS&E) students so they could spend a summer doing research under the direction of a female university professor. CRAW submitted a renewal proposal to NSF, and was recently recommended funding of $530,000 to continue the project for three more years.2

The goal of the Distributed Mentor Project has been to involve the students in research at a university with a female mentor, hoping to inspire them to continue on to graduate school in CS&E. It is too early to tell if the program has been successful in convincing students to attend graduate school, but it has attracted many student applicants and generated considerable enthusiasm among those funded.

The funds in the first two years of the grant permitted us to support about 25 students per summer (about $5,000 per student). Both years we received more than 75 student applications. Perhaps the most difficult aspect of my role was to turn down nearly 50 eager young women each year. About 30 female university professors volunteered each year to mentor one or more students, and we were able to match about three-quarters of them with students (see Table 1).

The students applied from US schools in 34 different states. Of all the applicants, 39% were from colleges and 44% from public universities, with 17% from private universities. By contrast, 50% of the mentors were professors at private universities. The funded projects ran the full gamut of CS&E: artificial intelligence (seven projects), software engineering (seven), algorithms (five), databases (five), user interfaces (four), graphics (three), numerical analysis (three), combinatorics (three), parallel computation (two), networks (two), distributed systems (two) and architecture (two).

With few exceptions, both the mentors and the students found the experience rewarding. One 1994 mentor said, "The experience was an overwhelming success." Another "found the experience to be extremely positive and rewarding." A third said, "This is a great program which can really make a difference for the young women involved." Several faculty members wrote conference papers with their mentees.

Most students were quite appreciative of the opportunity provided by the project. Typical comments from a survey completed by the 1994 students include: "I had the best summer of my life," "Having [x] as a mentor was probably the best thing that ever happened to me," and "This program has left me with probably one the most worthy experiences of my life."

Several students decided during their summer to apply to graduate school. One said, "Graduate school...is no longer a mysterious place that some graduates go." Another said, "Graduate school did not even come across my mind until this summer, and now I am looking forward to continuing my education after my undergraduate degree is completed."

The grant renewal includes funds for careful follow-up attempts to evaluate success beyond anecdotal evidence.

Three aspects of the mentor project have been controversial: restricting mentors to universities, restricting mentors to women and not providing funding for mentors. Excellent mentoring occurs in both industry and government. But the goals of the project are best served by embedding the students in a university environment, where they can learn firsthand what graduate school is like.

Men can successfully mentor undergraduate women. But men cannot as easily provide for female students the "psychosocial" functions so important in mentoring. Given the continued dearth of senior women in CS&E--95% of full professors are male, and more than 80% at all levels of the "pipeline" are male (see Table 2 [A95])--most students have no female role model at their home institutions. Our project brings the students to the mentors, in effect distributing the scarce resource of female mentors throughout the country.

The mentor project funds go solely and directly to the students: neither the mentors nor their institutions receive any money. Although the original proposal recognized that mentors should be compensated for their time, funding realities at NSF made it impossible to obtain support for mentors. Fortunately, enough women are willing to volunteer their time for what they perceive as a worthy goal: mentoring younger women keen to follow in their footsteps.

Summer 1996 applications are available from the Computing Research Association, 1875 Connecticut Avenue NW, Suite 718, Washington, DC 20009, ATTN: Distributed Mentor Project.

For more information, contact Anne Condon, Computer Sciences Department, 1210 W. Dayton St., University of Wisconsin at Madison, Madison, WI 53706. E-mail: condon@cs.wisc.edu.

References

[A95] G. R. Andrews, "CRA Taulbee Survey: Ph.D.s holding steady," Computing Research News, March 1995, 7(2) 6-16.

Joseph O'Rourke is a professor in the Department of Computer Science at Smith College. He is a member of CRAW and was the principle investigator for the first two years of the Distributed Mentor Project. His textbook, Computational Geometry in C, recently was published by Cambridge University Press (1994).