twincityhacker

I got a name badge for the conference. = )

All we really had to do today was sit and check people in, so Dana and I chatted a bit. I tried to convert her to the glee club of John Barrowman - I think she may actually look him up. ( It wasn't random! It was a natural follow up when she asked me what my favorite kind of music was. )

I have escaped one of the most awkard converstions that I might ever have. I was at a Women in Computing lucheon, and the topic was a study that someone did on mentoring. As the token undergrad of the hour, I got asked the question of whether I have a faculty mentor. I answered no, as I don't have one and have a tendecy not to ask people in RL questions about... anything.

Anway, the discussion ends and we all leave, and who walks in but on of my professors? I just hope that he didn't recognize me and no one remembers that I said I was talking the class he was teaching.

Besides the exit, the forum was good. Depressing, but good. Two professor's conducted a five university study about mentorship, and it turns out that the professors think they do a lot more mentorship than the undergrad or master degree students think that they're getting. On the order of 80% of professors think they make good mentors, and 20% of the students do.

The things that I found interesting was the way that respondents in the survey that they conducted got into the computer and applied computer sciences. The male students said that they got into the area in a younger age than the female respondents, and that the majority of the time the think that got females intrested in the area was a class, and the males it was self-study or in a group with friends.

Another thing that was mentioned that was a peer question on the survey, on whether or not the respondent was satisfied with their program had a great deal to do with their close friends in the unit. Someone posed a question on whether or not it made a deal with whether or not it made a difference with the gender mix, but it could not be answered with the data.

I think this should be followed up more, as I think it makes a large deal for female students in the area because most of the time you don't see a female student sitting in an area completely surrounded by males if possible. Instead, there's usually a few clusters of female students - and these clusters are more likely to be found near the front than the back. Of course, this is subjective to my expeince in all three of my classes, but it would be interseting to see how hat would work out.

Oh, and I've been up since five AM, trying to catch up on work. Some of it I've caught up on, but my programing, not so much.

In my "Infomatics textbook" - which isn't a textbook, but the draft of the textbook as my proffesor writes it - the first 'ponderble' the question is the following:

When an earth climte scientist says she has a "global model" of the Earth, it might see lke a contradiction in terms. Explain why it is, but it isn't either.

It's a fairly easy question - It's because the model consits of the entire Earth, and it's common to refer to the Earth as a globelar model instead of a planetary or Terrian or Teullarian model. But it's also not globlar as it doesn't contain all the parts of a climate system, like the Sun's effect on climate.

But it's because he reffered to the climate scientist as a she. Yes, it is not English-standard correct to call an unknown person a she, but it makes me feel all fuzzy to hear about women scientists, even if they're mearly hypothetical ones.

And, I got invited to a dinner for WIC. I didn't go to the last one as I only learned about it a day ahead of time and had previous commitments. But, this one I can go to! Yays! Okay, not yays to find out that the entire female continget of both Infomatics and CS in IU is about 57. My class has about 12 women in it, out of about 80.