IEEE Women in Engineering Magazine - December 2023 - 42

improve the journey to the Ph.D. degree
for all participants! "
It took about a year for Thriving Stars
Asu Ozdaglar, the first woman to lead the Department of Electrical Engineering and
Computer Science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
proposal to the Clare Boothe Luce Program
for Women in STEM seeking graduate
student fellowships-which EECS
was later awarded-and needed to pull
together data on how women were doing
in the program. They were impressed by
the statistics they found around success
rates, but, as Ozdaglar shared, " something
felt off. "
" The perception from the outside was
that the program was very cutthroat, "
she says. " We wanted to do something
to change that, and to let people know
there are women thriving here, they
enjoy their experience, and there's a lot
of support. " Plus, she adds, " promoting
this felt very aligned with our equity and
inclusivity efforts. "
" The challenging problems of our
future (and today for that matter)
require ideas and engagement from
everyone, " adds Kolodziejski about
the importance of those efforts. " Achieving
more equal representation will
to launch, and during that year the team
did a lot of research into what the program
should entail. One idea to host
workshops featuring women across the
industry and their visions for the future
of EECS led Ozdaglar and Kolodziejski to
reach out to Maria Klawe, the president
of Harvey Mudd College and a big advocate
of diversity in science, technology,
engineering, and mathematics. It was
Klawe who suggested the target goal of
40% female participation in the program
within three years and offered to chair
the initiative's advisory board. " Great, we
thought, let's form an advisory board! "
laughs Ozdaglar.
They pulled together a group of
women who could help think through
Thriving Stars programming. It was
important that the advisory board
include leaders from industry to demonstrate
that a Ph.D. degree would open up
various career trajectories for students,
not just a life in academia.
After assembling the board, Ozdaglar
and Kolodziejski also met with many of
the faculty at MIT to share their objectives
and solicit input from across the
university. " We had to have buy-in, "
shares Ozdaglar. " This is an effort that
requires participation from the whole
community. "
In their first year, Thriving Stars programming
focused on recruitment,
hosting information sessions with different
audiences as well as panels with
board members and alumni in different
career fields. Later a buddy system
was introduced, pairing prospective
students with existing ones for help
navigating the early stages of the process.
The goal was to demystify the
EECS Ph.D. degree, from describing
what life looks like during the five or
six years in the program to sharing
the experience of being a graduate and
what comes afterward.
There were also sessions with the
Aziza Almanakly working on a dilution refrigerator, which cools her experiment
down to almost absolute zero temperature (10 mK). Almanakly is a Graduate
Research Fellow within MIT's Engineering Quantum Systems group, recipient of the
P. D. Soros Fellowship for New Americans in 2021 and recipient of the Clare Boothe
Luce Graduate Fellowship in 2023.
42
IEEE WOMEN IN ENGINEERING MAGAZINE DECEMBER 2023
Admissions Committee to understand
how to identify the " gems " in the applicant
pool. As Ozdaglar explains, " typically
when you have such a big pool, you
M SCOTT BRAUER.
IEEE Women in Engineering Magazine - December 2023

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Women in Engineering Magazine - December 2023
