Blog

Camille Lesko and Sherry Hess

Last year, the WIE (Women in Engineering) Leadership Conference was held in Silicon Valley. Outside of the initial shock of seeing an audience of 99 percent technical females, the next awe factor was the lineup of keynote speakers -- CEO Lisa Su from AMD, CTO Sophie Vanderbroek of Xerox, CIO Rebecca Jacoby of Cisco, VP Patty Hatter of Intel. A male, Intel CEO Brian Krzanich, however gave the most impactful talk. Why? Because he raised our awareness of the ‘diversity challenge’ he issued to his company and the entire industry at the beginning of the year.

You would never guess by looking at me that I’m a geek at heart! I’m a blond-haired, green-eyed SoCal native and spent all my summers on the beach with nothing but my bike to get me around. I used to call my friends from old-school rotary phones. No personal computers, no internet, no smartphones or iPads. Once I got my driver’s license, I shared a very used 1970-ish pimento colored Olds Cutlass Supreme V-8 with my sister. It sported a white vinyl top—and we were delighted to have it. So, it makes absolutely no sense whatsoever that a blond-haired SoCal girl would have a blossoming geek inside…but there was!

Getting youth excited about STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) just has to be easier than getting them to keep their room clean! STEM is important to creating a lasting community of engineers making the world a better place. IMS is the premier engineering event where attendance records are routinely broken and everyone gives back to the community. The IMS STEM program aims to help parents connect with Radio Frequency (RF) and Microwave (MW) industry insiders, through this amazing program.

Listening to Tony Bennett’s “I left my heart in San Francisco," I can’t help but think of the many ways that the City has been such a big part of my personal and work life.  Growing up in the Bay Area, my father would take us to visit the Golden Gate Bridge.  At one of the many tourist landmarks—a massive cross-section of the cable that suspends the bridge—my father would photograph us. Only two of these huge cables hold the entire weight of the middle section of the bridge, containing 80,000 miles of wire steel strands, enough to encircle the equator three times.  We posed and we climbed on the cable.

Yikes! Here I am, noodling away, trying to figure out why people aren't more conservative, at least when it comes to charge in transistor modeling, when I realize that it's only TWO WEEKS until the IMS technical paper submission deadline!  I hope you are already well into writing your summary paper.  If not, we need to get our skates on over the Thanksgiving break and come up with three scintillating pages of technical excellence and eye-popping interest.  I am assuming here that you have already done the hard work, maybe just last week, or perhaps you are going to dust off those measured data or notes on that clever theory that you did last February, and you're in a position to crack on with the actual writing of the paper.

Hold on, not so fast. Let's just take a moment to think about what we should write and how we should go about it, to make sure that we have that best chance possible of getting our paper accepted into the most prestigious microwave conference in the world.