MentorNet Recognizes Woman Engineer Alumna Katherine Kuchenbecker
Dear Friends of Women in Science,
I have had some great experiences being a mentor for MentorNet. Right now, my life is too complex between various obligations so I cannot participate, but I highly recommend it to other senior women in STEM fields. It's a great way to enter into the joys and fears of the coming generation of scientists. You can specify fields, gender, etc for your mentee when you sign up.
While I am on hiatus from mentoring right now, I'm still on the mailing list, and recently they highlighted an alumna, Professor Katherine Kuchenbecker. You can see this feature by clicking here. Kuchenbecker is an Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics at the University of Pennsylvania, and a former MentorNet protégé. She has been named one of Popular Science's "Brilliant 10" for 2010, people whose accomplishments make them the most promising scientists in the US. She is the faculty advisor for the Society of Women Engineers at University of Pennsylvania, and she won the Penn Engineering Ford Motor Company Award for faculty advising in May, 2010. The MentorNet article quoted Kuchenbecker as follows,"Just because you're a little different doesn't mean you can't succeed. It's fun to help broaden the imagination of what people think about engineers, what engineers do. They work in teams and solve problems." She says that she has only rarely encountered any sexist beliefs in her field.
She became a MentorNet mentee in her fifth year at Stanford in Mechanical Engineering, and her advisor was Dr. Eliza Barney Smith, a professor of Electrical Engineering at Boise State University. Smith helped Kuchenbecker decide to become a professor and worked with her during the application process. She applied to 12 positions, both postdoctoral fellowships and faculty positions. She chose to spend a year at Johns Hopkins with Dr. Cheryl Okamura on haptics and medical robots before joining the faculty at University of Pennsylvania.During that year, she planned for her faculty position, found a new research interest, and got married.
In summarizing how she had thrived in the field, Kuchenbecker highlighted mentoring and networking, saying both MentorNet and a women's group to which she belonged at Stanford, where women taked openly with each other about their experiences, helped her a great deal. Because that worked for her, she likes to work in the same way with her students now. She said in the article for MentorNet, "My most satisfying moments as a professor are with students. Personal relationships are very satisfying. Students are so grateful that you will spend time with them to help them out."
How have your experiences with mentoring or being mentored gone? Please respond to the poll below, and comment if you have more to say!
cheers,
Laura
I don't think I expected the poll on this one to come out relatively evenly divided between all the choices, but it's interesting. I feel sad for those who never had a mentor, but some mentors are negative so it's better to avoid them. A positive role model can just appear in your life for an instant and make a deep impression, as some of you have noted. I remember Ursula Goodenough's Genetics book, how it seemed suddenly some women had discovered important things about chromosomes according to that book which I had as a text in my Genetics class. I loved it, and it resonated that she had chosen the best experiments. Of course, later male text writers changed the canon and the women she featured disappeared, sadly. But she was a role model for me, and when I wrote Genetics, A Molecular Approach for Macmillan in 1981, I tried to find the best experiment and if it was a woman who did it, she was in there.
cheers,
Laura
I've had some amazing male mentors that were not my advisors. That dual role is a complicated one and best separated in my experience. I never had a female mentor, but could have I suppose if I'd found one that I felt would add anything above what my male mentors did.
I agree that mentoring is a great way to help the next generation, and I always enjoy when I have time to work through MentorNet. I hope to have time again next year, but we'll see what life brings.
I never had a mentor. There's no choice for that. I did have "advisors" but they never took any particular interest in me or what I should be doing.
Because I had women mentors in high school and college science classes, but a man in graduate school, so for me it's complicated.
cheers,
Laura
