IEEE Women in Engineering Magazine - December 2017 - 55

norm to be an academic and have a family. With a newborn at home, the balance is a bit shaky, but she plans to push
forward, reengaging with her research
and graduating a number of students
over the next 12 months.
"The approach I take with my students is that I show them a Venn diagram
of my research interests and the interests
we can get funded, and I tell them that
their research needs to overlap with those
areas," describes Feigh. "But that's also
how I learn a lot of different things. It's
why I'm working on language for how we
want robots to teach, which is not something I ever thought I would do. That's
been a lot of fun, and I look forward to
continuing to do that."
Working with students, Feigh has the
opportunity to guide them not just with
research, but with their careers. "I counsel a lot of students on not being afraid
to change the course of their paths.
Start off with something you're passion-

ate about and, if you find something else
you're passionate about, don't be afraid
to do the work to make the switch," she
counsels. "I did my bachelor's degree in
aerospace engineering, having no clue
that industrial engineering even existed.
But it was definitely the right path for
me to go from aerospace to industrial."
Furthermore, she advises, "Find people
you admire, and who do good work, and
strike up a professional friendship with
them so that you have people to go to for
advice. It's not always the mentors who are
much farther into their careers; near-term
mentors can be really valuable too."
One of Feigh's mentors, David Kaber,
is the editor-in-chief of THMS and is
doing a lot to advance the participation-specifically of women-in the
SMC space. As the role of systems in
society continues to increase, people like
Kaber, Feigh, and the members of SMC
are encouraging professionals across
fields to consider human factors in their

work. "If you're working on a project
where you have human users and you
have questions about how can you better
support those users, there is an entire
field of engineers you can reach out to
for advice," says Feigh.
Though she may not have known she
would perform this type of work, Feigh's
winding path led her to a place she looks
forward to staying in for quite some time
as she prepares to become a full professor at Georgia Tech. She's also raising
the next generation of engineers, both in
her career and at home. "It's amusing to
me that my parents knew from a young
age that I would become an engineer,"
says Feigh. "Because now I'm raising a
two-and-a-half-year-old and I'm positive
I have another engineer on my hands.
He loves pulling things apart and putting them back together-with about a
50% success rate!"
-Leslie Prives

Pipelining
Attractive Programs for Women continued from page 48
Her career started with an internship at The Washington Post. She then
landed a coveted position with Time,
Inc. in Los Angeles, where she wrote for
Time, Fortune, and Money.
It's when she was traveling as a
journalist that she came to understand
exactly how ubiquitous her father had
become. "I kept sitting next to people
on planes who knew him," she smiles.
"I got used to hearing, "You're related to
George Bekey?"
After profiling Teradata, then a "little company working out of a garage,"
for a business magazine, Michelle was
invited to work for the up-and-coming
data analytics company directly. She
accepted, launching a consulting career
that included long-running relationships with IBM and a major information
technology consulting and accounting
firm, among many others. "The technical focus evolved out of that kind of accidental meeting that so often happens to
us early in our careers," she says. It was

a good fit: the right opportunity at the
right time for someone with the right
genetic inheritance.
Michelle even found her way back to
George's professional home. One of the
architects of ARPANET, the predecessor to today's Internet, USC's Information Sciences Institute (ISI) made major
contributions to Transmission Control
Protocol/Internet Protocol and invented
the Domain Name System, among other
groundbreaking research. Coincidentally, George had been pivotal to bringing
ISI to USC in the 1970s. When Michelle
began working with ISI, the Institute's
website "looked like someone had put it
together at 2 a.m. about ten years earlier," she says. "It was a pretty bad case
of the cobbler's children being shoeless."
Her subsequent contributions included
conceptualizing, writing, managing, and
producing new websites; playful-yet-substantive ISI researcher portraits; and a video
series de-mystifying ISI's black-box identity for the outside world. "Good, fact-based

DECEMBER 2017

journalism speaks clearly to intelligent
audiences who aren't necessarily familiar
with a particular topic-without insulting
those who are," Michelle observes.
It's not difficult to see that a head
for technology helps in her work, but
Michelle points out that the flip side is
also true. Almost any method of communication used in technology spheres,
whether research, academic, or corporate, benefits from a sense of story.
Websites, video, presentations, social
media, and other forms all are served
by a writer's ability to carry a narrative,
she adds.
Once, when George was on a plane,
he looked over and saw the man next to
him reading one of Michelle's articles.
"My daughter wrote that," George said.
"You're related to Michelle Bekey?" the
man asked, impressed. The professional
respect between father and daughter now
flies both ways.
-Katianne Williams

IEEE WOMEN IN ENGINEERING MAGAZINE

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Women in Engineering Magazine - December 2017