Collaborative Research Experience for Women

By Sheila Castaneda

In 1994, the National Center for Educational Statistics surveyed 1,158,170 students who had received their baccalaureate degrees the previous year. This survey included 9,650 women with Computer Science (CS) degrees. Of those, 2.94 percent were enrolled in graduate school one year after graduating. If the study were restricted to CS women with a GPA greater than or equal to 3.5, the percentage falls to 2.53. By comparison, of the 17,860 men with CS degrees, 9.23 percent went on to graduate school. If the male sample is restricted to a GPA greater than or equal to 3.5, the percent going on to graduate school is 29.19.

A new initiative sponsored by the Computing Research Association's Committee on the Status of Women in Computing Research (CRA-W) is designed to provide groups of undergraduate women the experience of participating in collaborative research in an effort to lessen the gap in the statistics between men and women.

The Collaborative Research Experience for Women in Undergraduate Computer Science and Engineering (CREW) is designed to provide collaborative research experiences for groups of two to three undergraduate women during the academic year. Research is conducted at the home institutions of the students. The student researchers work with a sponsoring faculty member on a project for which monetary support is typically not available. Ordinarily each student receives a stipend of $1,000 for her research work. There is no support provided by this program for faculty stipends, however up to $500 per project may be requested for special equipment, travel or supporting materials. It is hoped that by increasing the opportunity to do research and by decreasing the isolation that may be experienced in doing independent research, women scientists and engineers will be encouraged to pursue similar work in graduate school.

To be eligible, students should be entering their junior or senior years. All projects must be directly related to computer science or computer engineering and be suitable for undergraduate research.

At the end of the project, students are required to submit a one-page summary of their work. These summaries are posted on the CRA-W website. Of course, students are also encouraged to submit papers and present their work to other appropriate journals and conferences.

In the first year of the project, twenty-two applications were received and nine were funded. These nine projects involve twenty-three undergraduate women working with ten sponsoring faculty members at the following institutions:

Brooklyn College, CUNY
Bryn Mawr College
Case Western Reserve University
Grinnell College
Mills College
North Carolina A&T State University
Sonoma State University
Texas Christian University
University of Wisconsin, La Crosse

The nine groups of undergraduate women are involved in a wide variety of research areas including robotics, expert systems, smart objects, VLSI partitioning, web tools, motion planning, and processor allocation. These well-defined projects are reasonable for undergraduate research and are scoped to allow students to achieve measurable results during the current academic year. Often, these research projects were the only ones available on their home campuses for the students to participate in, and for several of the faculty members it was the only funding source for the research projects. During the course of their research, the student teams work closely with each other and with their sponsors, who provide guidance and often actively participate in the actual research.

It is hoped that the CREW project will provide a positive collaborative research experience for the students involved. To help evaluate the effectiveness of the program, students will be asked to complete a survey of their research experience, the CREW program, and the effect it has had on their future plans. A follow-up survey will occur a year after the completion of their projects to help evaluate the longer-term effects.

The deadline for applications for the 1999-2000 academic year is May 15, 1999. More information about the Collaborative Research Experience for Women in Undergraduate Computer Science and Engineering can be found at the web location www.cra.org/Activities/craw/crew.html. Questions and comments should be addressed to Sheila Castaneda at cast@keller.clarke.edu.

Sheila E. Castaneda is Chair and Associate Professor in the Computer Science Department at Clarke College in Dubuque, Iowa. She is also a member of the CRA-W and is the project director of the CREW program.