<p>^how many got there through science though? It is hard to go that route when you are constantly being told you might not be good enough.</p>
<p>Yes, texaspg, my mother was in the US–and in a small college town, in fact, where you might have thought that people would be more enlightened.</p>
<p>And yes, there are other countries where some number of women of my mother’s generation went into science (without having to be Marie Curie’s daughter).</p>
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<p>Someone who learned the language at home but not in school may have good listening and speaking skills, but poor reading and writing skills. Some colleges offer specific heritage speaker versions of the language courses for such students. But if the college does not offer such courses, then the student may have to enroll in the course based on the weakest of the language skills, even if other language skills are strong.</p>
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<p>I didn’t think much of the programs until my girlfriend got involved with the Women in CS group at her school. For a large part, I think it served somewhat as a support group to remind women that they’re not alone in the field, even though it might feel like it in some of their classes. They’d have successful women in engineering/CS come in and give a talk (work/life/child balance), they’d do outreach aimed at young girls, and basically try to raise consciousness of the idea that even though you’re a woman, it’s alright to enter the male dominated field.</p>
<p>I used to help out with some Society of Women Engineers events in my undergrad days, and I can honestly say the Girl Scouts tended to be way more excited than the Boy Scouts I’d have coming through during different events. It was also great since the troop leaders tended to be moms, and I think seeing a lot of women (and men accepting of women) active in STEM fields really drove home the fact that their daughter could do exactly what we were doing if the kid wanted.</p>
<p>I won’t lie, though, Brownies tried to steal more stuff off my demo table than any other group I’ve ever met.</p>
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The top schools don’t need to dumb down the curriculum to do any “minority manipulation” tasks. Mudd (MIT/Harvard/Caltech/Yale) gets way more <em>qualified</em> students than it can accept. They can use the desirable trait as a tiebreaker. So if Mudd has a few thousand applicants that are all qualified, and they only want to accept 600, they can accept the 300 M (16%) and 300 F (41%) and STILL be accepting only top kids. They have to reject kids based on SOMETHING, and there are too many kids who are good enough, so why not let it be gender?</p>
<p>And Mudd actually has FOUR intro CS classes. The regular, advanced, and bio-flavored mentioned before, and another that blends the first and second semester CS classes into one. This really takes the super-prepared kids out of the three levels of intro classes. Having intro classes is necessary, because all schools will have kids will really excel in a particular subject and kids who don’t. My son took the 2-in-1 CS class, but also in the intro-level bio class that many bio majors skip completely.</p>
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I attended a panel on “work/life/child balance” at a STEM field conference once. It was pretty inane and not all that useful. Just sayin’.</p>
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<p>Mary Sue Coleman: president of the Univeristy of Michigan. BS in Chemistry, PhD in biochem, and a pretty awesome university president from what I can tell.</p>
<p>^^Carol Folt, next Chancellor at Carolina (and current Interim Prez at Dartmouth).</p>
<p>science Bachelors, Masters and PhD all from a (gasp) public: UC.</p>
<p>Why is she leaving Dartmouth?</p>
<p>Today’s panel discussion: “Work/life/child balance for the woman scientist”
Tomorrow’s panel discussion: “Best natural foods for your purple unicorn”</p>
<p>sylvan, I’ll agree that most of those things are, for the most part, a snoozefest. I think a lot of time those topics wound up happening during a Q&A session instead of being the focus of a talk.</p>
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It only took me the first sentence of reading your post to realize you misinterpreted my post. My post was generic and not specifically towards “top” schools. If you spent enough time reading through these posts you would know my stance on this topic and if you read the surrounding posts you understand the context of the conversation.</p>
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It wasn’t that. Of the 5 women who talked about their experiences and gave advice, all 5 of them had young children and/or infants. They talked about things like:</p>
<p>1) How to schedule your pregnancy so as not to give birth during the semester (yeah, like you have THAT much control over it)
2) Breastfeeding on the job
3) Childbirth leave policies
4) Finding suitable day care, yada yada. </p>
<p>By the time of this conference, my children were 11 and 13 and didn’t need day care. They should have had a variety of women talking about their experiences balancing work/family at different ages/phases. It was as if they thought that once the kid/kids were in kindergarten all their worries about balance would be over. As all of us on CC Parents know, the issues don’t end there.</p>