Talk:Mentoring Ideas

From CISEREUPI

Mentoring Female Students

Ideas: It is common recognition that female students are underrepresented in the computer science major and computer science graduate school. We want to improve this situation through the REU program.

Objective: Use the REU experience to attract more female students to the CS major and the CS graduate school.

What Works Well:

 1. Admit female students in their early career to REU. For example, we always admitted female students in their freshman or sophomore year. This generally can retain them in CS and possibly can lead them to graduate school. 
 2. Assign a female faculty mentor or graduate mentor to female students. If a male faculty mentor or graduate mentor is assigned, provide chance that the female students can interact with female faculty or graduate. This is because 1) it is observed that female students are more willing to talk about their concern with female faculty or graduate, 2) it is always nice to have female faculty or graduate in the REU as role model. 
 3. Provide chance to female students to practice their leadership skill in school. There are many ways to do that. For example, you can have a group of mixed male and female students and assign the female student as the group leader. Or in the event that involves everybody like Journal Club, let the female student lead the discussion after the presentation. Or in the publication process (normally this happens after the program), let the female student coordinate other students in their home institution (with the help/mentoring from faculty). The coordination task normally includes distributing paper-writing to every student, submission, registration, distributing presentation-slides-writing, and doing presentation in the conference.
 4. Always open yourself (male or female faculty) to talk to female students about how to balance the family-career relationship.
 5. Allow students (both male or female) to switch group if they do not like the group that is originally assigned to them (we assign students to groups before they come in based on their preference listed in the application form). This actually can happen to both male or female students but what happened to us is that female students often requested that (there may be some sophistical phycological reason for that but we do not know).  
 6. Involve female students into local technical groups of, for example, IEEE or ACM, in addition to the student chapter of which they may already be a member. This may not be directly related to the REU but it is helpful telling the female students that their home institution or city should have such groups and people there very welcome them to attend their meetings to get knowing the society in which they may join after they are out of school. 
 7. Invite a female graduate alumna to speak about her experience of doing research as an undergraduate and how this leads to her graduate school application and how she is doing in the graduate school.  

What Doesn’t Work So Well:

 1. Don’t push female students too hard at the beginning of their research career. We observe that female students normally are easier to be scared off from the research if they felt overwhelming at the beginning.
 2. Don’t complain that there is less female in computing from the perspective such that computing is not female-friendly. Talk about it from the positive perspective such that being able to work and compete in the environment that has more male make them distinguished.
 3. Don’t only give narrowly-defined computing problems to female students. Women tend to be more interested in broader problems such as those relate to social science, politic science, etc. Introducing such kind of the multi-disciplinary project to them can in general increase their interest in research.  

How to Measure It: We have not implemented any special evaluation on this issue beyond the regular evaluation. In general this can be measured by the number of female students who attend graduate school. But tracing this data may take some years if the student was a freshman or sophomore when she did the REU. This can also be measured by quantified data like what percentage of self-confidence is changed before and after the REU, what number of the professional groups that they attend is changed before and after the REU (this need to be tracked after they return their home institution), etc.

Assessment Data: See above.

Resources: Many returning pages by googling by “mentoring women in school”.

Attribution: Originally contributed by the Mentoring Working Group on Mar 18, 2010. Adopted and extended by Yu Zhang from Trinity University on Mar 19, 2010.