Women Rise: Sheri Sheppard

Key Takeaways

good morning from Stanford to wherever you are in the world thank you for being here today part of the women rise Community I'm Robin Woodman and I am here with Dr Sherry Shepard thank you for being here today she is a professor emerita of the mechanical engineering department here at Stanford and her building is just right across the street so this was really we're neighbors yeah we're doing something a little bit fun today where we're going to be in the same room thank you for being here great and she's going to talk to us about her journey up the obstacles that she had in making tenured professor some of the maybe the traps that she had to overcome um and I like to call it the story behind the story and it's always so nice when people can come and share that with us so thank you so much for being here today thank you Robin and it's great to be here but I actually want to actually be here so I'm going to ask all of you to indulge me as we start and I'd like all of you to be here and I suspect that you've had a busy morning you've maybe had several meetings maybe you've gotten kids off to school so indulge me in helping helping me do some big breathing so get comfortable maybe put your feet flat on the floor and we're going to do some blue jay breathing okay so let's all take a big breath in a big breath out let's do two more big breath in big breath out in out thank you now I feel like I'm here Robin so thank you so it is really great to be here to talk a little bit about um this idea of being alone or are you alone in your work and the yes trap so those are the the two themes that I'm hoping we'll have some time to discuss and I urge you as I go along if you've got questions or you've got comments please add them in in the chat that is available to you um so in some ways my career has been very much Alone um you know for 18 years I was the only women woman Professor on the faculty from 1986 and then 18 years later we finally hired another woman to be on the team and now we actually have seven women on the faculty in most of my engineering classes in the 1970s I was the only woman in the class and I never had a female professor in any of my math or engineering courses um and I you know I could focus on that but I'm not going to because I'm going to really talk about some strategies of getting through that I would say when I enter a room I still though look around and scan who's in the room and how many women are at the table how many people of color are at the table how many people with disabilities so that issue of of how do we increase diversity and a sense of belonging are still very much part of my Personal Agenda but also my professional agenda so I'm going to talk about you know this process of not feeling Alone by team building and so I'd like to introduce you to three of the teams that have been particularly important to me along the way and I hope that as I talk about this idea of a team that gets you thinking about whose team are you on or who's on your team in these three particular categories and so first I'd like you like to introduce you to this team and you'll see three characters here this is Mrs Miller this is Homer Shepard and this is professor karagian and they are I'll call them team career and um let me tell you a little bit of the stories of these three people so Mrs Miller was my violin teacher from the time I was in seventh grade until 12th grade and um and from her I really learned what it is to work hard you know what does it mean to take something that at first you're not very good at and then work and work and work with feedback on getting better at it and and I think that was the first time I recognized that that being good at something isn't just a natural act you're not just born knowing how to do something but but with Direction and dedication you can get good at something and and that was actually a very prideful field that I was good at something it also set my sights on maybe being a professional musician as a career and you know what would it be like to play Bach or Beethoven or Brahms you know in Carnegie Hall and I have to say I was also drawn to the idea of being able to wear elegant gowns and and um have fancy hairdos and and that that could be my career path so um Mrs Miller was key in many ways in thinking about my career team the second person is Homer Shepard who um happens to be my father and um he is an engineer or he was an engineer he passed away a few years ago and um you know he influenced me because I really admired how he thought you know a problem would come up in the house and it could be a broken dishwasher or a dilemma in the yard and his approach wasn't to panic you know it was maybe to say a swear word but then he really got into a strategy of decomposing what was wrong you know let's let's look at the symptoms and let's have a theory and how do we put that together to maybe puzzle through what might be happening um you know at that point I said engineering though is not for me my dad worked in a Foundry and if you've visited a Foundry it's a very noisy messy hot sweaty environment certainly not where you could wear elegant gowns um and so I really wasn't thinking about engineering but I did admire and start to recognize that ways of thinking are important and Engineering had something to it so that's the second person on my my team the third is a professor um courageian um who was one of my professors when I was working on my master's degree in engineering so somehow I did pivot from music to uh to engineering and I was working on this Masters because I thought it was a step to becoming a CEO of Chrysler Corporation where I happened to be an engineer at the time and really seeing more technical depth was important I was also thinking about enrolling in an MBA program thinking again if you want to rise in an organization you know you need to understand even more than the technical about what a business is and I saw in Professor courageous someone who was so dedicated to his mission for teaching and he wasn't simply going into a classroom and delivering material to people but in fact he was making that material come alive to individuals and so it really planted the seed of saying is there are there other ways for me to be in the in the world besides being a CEO of a company um he took me under his wing in terms of helping me write or co-authoring with me at my first technical paper and he suggested ah they need some teachers at night at Lawrence Institute of Technology you might be good at teaching and so he put that seed in me of thinking about teaching so I won't tell you how that mix of that team came together in my mind at various stages of my career to influence where I ended up being for the last 36 years but I will leave you with a little teaser about team career and that's Gertrude um so Gertrude is a member of my life and I can tell you the story of Gertrude and the role that she's playing or how I'm playing her in my life now um even though I'm not a professional musician okay so that's the first team um the second team I'd like to talk with you about is well and actually actually you know one of the things to to leave you with too uh is you thinking about who is on your career team um and you know how has that changed over the years and what has been the influence of those individuals as you think about steps or stages of your career so my next team is the team you go girl um and um members of that team are Grandma Joe Grandma Whitaker and Simona Frank and so let me tell you the stories of Grandma Joe Grandma Whitaker and and Simona Frank and I would say as a team they really Illustrated to me there's no one way to have a happy life and to be a person a woman who is having influence on the world and that you don't have to follow set rules because it's not clear what those rules are so Grandma Joe um um you know didn't follow rules you know she stayed up until the wee hours of the morning to be making things she was forever making things um she didn't like housekeeping and so I really as a kid looked at her house as this amazing Museum where you could touch stuff you know because most museums you can't I now realize she probably was a borderline hoarder um and she didn't like to cook while she did except when she cooked she would cook large amounts of food so she didn't have to cook but one time a week she also had a trunk of her car that was filled with picket signs because she was a devoted devoted to Union and workers rights so I really saw her passion coming out in that way so so she was one of my goatee girl team the other was my other grandmother who you could say was in some ways very much a contrast she didn't like to cook either so much in fact often went out to restaurants or we ate deli sandwiches when we visited with her but she was one of the few medical doctors in the country in the 1920s so she went the route of medical school and uh practiced until well until the 1970s and so she was really a model of of a woman taking a path that wasn't a common path and in fact in the little town where she and my grandfather um set up their practice in Southeast Missouri um many of the citizens of the Town thought she was a witch doctor and so really couldn't believe in fact that that she was um was a doctor and I would hear her talking with her patients and I really saw kindness and professionalism and really a incredible professional woman doing her work that was sometimes ignored or pushed back on by the people that she was trying to help so she's the second member of my go you go girl team the the third member is um my my sister Simona Frank um who's who's 13 years older than I am and I should tell a little bit about about history here so my sister was going to high school um in roughly 19 um 61 is when she graduated I graduated from high school in 1974 and if you're aware of history that was a pretty pivotal um era in the United States in terms of women's rights and and an agenda expanding what what women could be doing um Roe v Wade was in the early 1970s Title IX um which we've been celebrating was also in the early 1970s so my sister was coming of age at a time when when there hadn't been these expanded rights um and and access to things but that didn't stop her um my sister and graduating from college took on a job that no other woman in the country had taken on on she was with a team of four other women that became Bank examiners for the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation which is a branch of our U.S government and so I saw in in this individual who I love and love dearly someone who was doing things that were not conventional too you know in taking on roles so um so that's that's the go girl team that has influenced me and just as a little bit of of History too um so this this is an ad that IBM put out and I'll tell you the year in just a minute but you see some pink booties and some blue booties and it says um as things stand it doesn't take much guess to which one of these will grow up to be an engineer because by and large he is encouraged to excel in math and science she isn't whatever the reason for the just discrepancy the cost to society is enormous because it affects women's career choices and limits the contributions they make can make only four percent of all Engineers are women only 13.6 percent of all math and science phds are women and an encouraging but still low 31.3 percent of all professional computer programmers are women I have to say and I'll tell you the year that this this came out as an ad and it was a gift from my dad actually to me um we are up to about 15 of all Engineers being women so the number has risen from that four percent unfortunately the number of people women in computer science has fallen from 31 so so that that's a declining number um I am happy to report that there is now more social science and some of the work I do actually is in this field for us understanding why there is this Gap and what things need to change about the system in order to encourage more women to become engineers so this came out in 1985 this ad of IBM saying um this is an important area for us to be working in um and it still is so that's my second team um okay so let me introduce you to my third and final team that I'm going to talk about and that's team kindness and it's made up of Bernie Roth and Ruth Shepard you might suspect that she's my mom she is and um Ed carrier so let me tell you um what what that team has been like so Bernie Roth is a dear colleague and friend um and has been since my first day of Stan stepping on to the Stanford campus some 36 years ago and a lesson for from Bernie about kindness is is kindness really needs to at first and and foremost be directed inward too you know I think sometimes we're awfully hard on ourselves and not really candid with ourselves and so and so that kindness to ourselves is important and for me with Bernie that was for instance is inviting me to a yoga class some 20 years ago and I had not done yoga as a girl from Wisconsin and and Michigan and that's really become a self-kindness that I practice maybe not every day but quite a few days of the week in terms of taking care of myself both mentally and and physically another kindness from Bernie is actually being quite candid with myself and and learning to be honest about why I'm doing something why I'm not doing something and and really not to quote Bernie not bullshitting myself about my reasons for doing things and you know I learned this through a series of workshops that I attended that Bernie happened to be one of the co-leaders on I've also learned it time and time again with his book which I highly recommend it's called the achievement habit stop wishing to start doing and take command of your life by Bernie Ross so um kindness starts at home and starts with us as as individuals just to give illustrate just a little bit of Bernie's philosophy so this is a little card he gave me at some point and um on decision making and it says are are you happy and it says yes if that's the way you're going and it says well then keep doing what you're doing and then the other path is are you happy no um and then it says here um change something or no it says do you want to be happy that's the next question you know you're not happy is it important to be happy and if you say um do you want to be happy no you just keep doing the things you want to be doing but if you want to be happy you change something and so that's kind of one of the the backbones if you will of his book here um so that's Bernie the self-kindness um from my mom really recognizing that that kindness can happen in very very small ways you know with our interactions with other people and and maybe it's holding a door open or or sending somebody after they've given a talk boy that talk was really great thanks for giving it um in my mother's case it showed up in her 30 years of teaching you kind of see I ended up doing a lot of what my parents did an engineer and a teacher but it wasn't the original path she would every night when her fifth graders left she would be at the door and she would Shake individual hands and say Miss Smith or Mr Jones have a good evening I look forward to seeing you tomorrow I hadn't realized how how important that little kindness was until after she passed away a few years ago one of her former students who was probably my age said that made the difference in him having confidence to survive fifth grade and actually go on and become a doctor so we don't know how those little kindnesses impact one another so that's a lesson for my mom on on kindness I would say from the last character that that's on my go team at carrier um Ed's also I'm I'm we're married and we've been married for 44 years so a long time and I think the lesson there is that um kindness never goes out of fashion um you know even with somebody that you've known for a long time and you really can let your hair down um those kindnesses remain important and and whether it's a it's a choosing Diet Coke instead of Diet Pepsi because you know that's what he likes and and is available or leaving a little um a mint on on the pillow and um just a lot of little things that that our kindness is that that do accumulate so on on that team you know I would ask you to think about what kindness is and maybe you already received today what kindnesses have you extended to others and and how does that come into your everyday practice um with the go girl team you know a question I should have put out there would be um whose goal go girl team are you maybe on um and who's on your go go girl team um so I should say some caveats with these teams um some of these characters have actually been on various parts of these teams so they're not exclusive teams um there are also of many many other people who are on these teams so that they're not all just three-person teams um some living some not living some younger than much younger than I am some much older than I am um and I suspect that when you think about what are the teams that are important to you they may fall into these three categories but there may be other categories so for instance I also have a team spiritual and that's the team you know that really helps me think about those bigger loftier questions or the meaning of My Life um and and God and and what role does God play um and I also have an exercise team you know beyond my doing yoga that gets me out there hiking um when I think I'm too busy um so really be also thinking about what are your teams and whose team are you playing on so that's the team part of it like what do you want to talk about Robin or what Sherry I've been coming in I love that we have so many great questions and I really loved how you divided that all up and I really love team kindness team kindness was so great especially um with Bernie Roth so Bernie's a fixture over in the d-school what a lovely human being I've gotten to interact with him a few times and every time it's just a pleasure and a joy yeah um so I really like that Bernie's advice was be kind to yourself first because that's where it all begins yeah yeah so thank you for that so we have some great questions it looks like Sandra has asked a really great question she said what if you were alone and you don't have support where are some places maybe that you could look for your team have you had some experience with you've um found your team or maybe some sponsorship or or mentorship that maybe could answer Sandra's question yeah um you know I think I think they're looking for um certainly actually reaching out and attending this webinar is is a good starting point of of looking at what resources there are there's also you know Finding like interests you know and it could be hiking you know and and and actually seeing where the non-professional can also be professional links um you know going to women's events um for instance tonight we're hosting um I'm I'm uh The Faculty advisor for a group called The Emmy women's group and it's um a club if you will or an organization a graduate student women in the department that's been around for 25 years and we're hosting a welcome reception for alumni from the me Department as well as all of the graduate student women in the department so be looking for those sort of events um that that are happening um do you have any thoughts for her too I think that's I think that's great advice and I really like the advice of not only looking professionally and try not to Silo those and make those in you know discrete buckets but if what you enjoy doing outside can also Traverse over to what you enjoy doing professionally looking for groups I totally agree with you and then also I think that there's something that maybe we get trapped in ourselves a lot and we're in our heads and we're ruminating a lot on things and nine times out of ten the people that are around you the women that are around you are having those same thoughts that you are having and sometimes it's about just extending the first word yeah um hi I'm you here or I'm not really sure how to do this but um I'm I'm getting used to it or just having that first word towards someone could really start that bridge building that bridge in a really big way you know it also reminds me of a technique that we um we teach in a series of classes called designing your life and there's a designing the professional that I was originally part of the teaching team on and we we teach in that information interviewing and you know this sense of of reaching out to someone to say you don't know me your life looks interesting can I have 15 minutes of your time to talk about you and it's amazing how people are very receptive in talking about themselves absolutely part of my reasons for saying yes to this we love that you want to talk to you about yourself thank you um and and you may get some no's but that people like to feel like they have something to give absolutely so um it you know even for Stanford students sometimes that's a big step to say you know I'm gonna I'm gonna email somebody and will they get back with me or I'm going to try to call them yeah putting yourself out there in that way yeah yeah I totally agree I think that's great advice and you know it it builds on what you were saying of going in with this I've got questions yeah yeah and it's and it's great and it's okay and it's not a sign of weakness in fact I think it's a sign of courage to be able to be able to say that that reminds me you know the reaching out um I had not been in in this role very long of it being an assistant professor and I had the experience every time I would go into my chair's office I would come out and go to the bathroom and cry oh and and you know I'm thinking nobody else has this you know and and this experience well I was at a conference um soon after that and I was going up the elevator with another assistant professor who I admired very much I knew I knew her and I said to her Pam do you ever cry she goes I do it all the time and we were like we hugged one another because whoa we're not alone see it's it's about having that first word yeah oh that's such a great story thank you so much for that that's so great to you and I love how you were so honestly like you didn't need Peter on the bush do you cry oh that's so great um okay thank you so much for that we have some great questions coming in um let's see Laura wants to know how do you represent women in the field of engineering without getting exhausted is it just as subversive for a woman in engineering to just do the work without always having to represent women oh I I love this question um because um this particularly annoyed me for the first 18 years as the only woman on the faculty and and I don't know if I was projecting but you know I'd be in a meeting only woman there and people would ask well what do you think Sherry and and maybe they were being kind but I often interpreted it like what's the woman's point of view here and and I'm only one woman with one experience yeah um so that was annoying and it was also I'd only been here a year or two and and one of my dear colleagues I think he thought he was being kind but he asked what is it like being a woman assist professor and I was stumped because I know what it's like being an assistant professor how being a woman you know layers on that I'm not sure so yeah so I I think I said well I can answer the question about what I'm experiencing as an assistant professor but but I'm not sure it's Unique to me being a woman um so this is where actually getting colleagues whether they be in the Sciences or outside can be really helpful both in sharing the workload of of if you feel compelled and I certainly have in my career to be proactive in saying yes I'm going to do the work and I see this other burden and responsibility in figuring out how other women can be at the table and other diversity can be at the table um so so actually building a network of other people to say could you do this or I'm going to do this um and and then even borrowing material and then also learning some sometimes you have to say no and then that gets to our second topic but you know you can't do it all so you have to preserve that kindness to yourself in feeling like I've given enough for right now I can't take on another speaking engagement or you know another op-ed article to write um so that would be you know managing it by sometimes saying no too which I think is a great a great thing to do I think when when we email back and forth about possibly coming here I'm always very cognizant of what I'm asking you know and and understanding that I'm sending one email with one request but how many are you actually Fielding yeah and so it's really important for me to I I want to extend the grace of saying it's okay if you if if you can't do it I totally understand or here's the here's the ask and and you don't have to put together a slide deck and yeah it really just good right oh yeah I mean anything you want to put a slide deck for I'm in like call me up call me up but you know just having these kinds of conversations and letting people into the background of what's going on I think is one of the most important things that we can be doing I just I just think it's so helpful you know I've also recognized that that I'm not an expert in women's issues I mean that's not my field of study and so this is where again connecting with others has been really important and so you know a an important colleague for me for instance is Londa sheebinger who's um over in the history department and she looks at design from the perspective of who's included and who's not included and and how to develop new guidelines to be more inclusive and thinking about design and her website is called gendered Innovations so you know I I will pull Londa into my conversation of like I've been asked to do this maybe it's better that you do it or do you have some material that's fresh and new that I can pull in yeah another really important um colleague of mine has been Carol Muller who really knows the literature on on women and and engineering and stem fields and and so relying on Carol if I need to you know what are some of the most recent writings that have been happening right right and that sounds like team collaboration yeah yes you're right so we need another team it's always good to have those collaborators and I think and I think it's a it's an important distinction to make just because you you know you are a woman or we we are women it doesn't mean we're gonna speak to everything yeah it just means we can speak to what your story is or what my story is yeah and that's pretty much and I think having that caveat is is a great distinction to make um it looks like we had a great comment here from from kavya thank you for sharing your various names for your support groups that makes it easy to comprehend and realize that we may be overlooking our cheering Squad and thinking we don't have one I agree I mean it's it's great it can come from anywhere and we need to recognize it and acknowledge it and let it motivate us and carry us through our moments of doubts I just love that concept thank you and she's going to be sharing it with her daughter is she starting her career as a young student which is exactly why we have these sessions you know the other thing I realized in making up this prompt for here this is going to become a poster on my um in my office you know both so that my students see that you know it's not just me there's other people being represented here and as a reminder for me because you know sometimes I have dark days too and and kind of oh there's a team oh yeah oh yeah who who is available on the team today yeah yeah absolutely absolutely cool so Sarah had a great question do you have any advice for raising young women today or techniques for encouraging exploration in stem yeah um so you know I think um getting young women um making things you know and really using their hands um to and and you know making things ranges from sewing I mean I think sewing is an incredible activity of going from a two-dimensional world to a three-dimensional world and working inside and outside so in terms of spatial reasoning it's really great also though maker spaces and and thinking about you know what is this electronic stuff and um demystifying that and you know I think there are a number of of camps for instance that Stanford offers in in the summertime they're also now in Girl Scouts badges related to Technology and Engineering so that's another chance to get get girls involved I would also say you know I would say and I actually have a daughter she's 33 and um she didn't go down the engineering path she's uh she was a history major and is the youth librarian in um and the San Leandro Public Library across across the bay so she she found her own path um but exposing girls to making as well as as what is it to be a modern woman and that there is that diversity that includes fancy dresses you know as well as blue jeans when when things get messy um you know I think also giving them um some backbone of when do you push back when do you also say you know I've got an opinion here um how to also and I I think we see this with our students women students too not fall into the documentation role in a team yeah or the planning role and those are important roles I don't mean to diminish them but also you know having them be able to say you know I can write that code or I don't know how to write that code but I'm going to figure it out because that's where I want to expand my learning so a certain level of I would say assertiveness um in all of this yeah absolutely um something about your daughter being a librarian I can tell you that the librarian for me was my hero I loved My Librarian every year because I was the kid that I was always reading a book and it was my Escape it was also my very safe place and I could just like whip through them and I would leave the library with just like stacks and then the librarian would pull books for me I just felt so um taken care of yeah well it sounds like similar my daughter had an experience with her librarian that she had from Nursery School through eighth a woman named Misha and Misha would serve tea in the library too so there was also this this wonderful Community I would say now as a librarian though she's also got a grant and she installed a Makerspace in the library because really starting to see how can that place for kids be about books and about imagination but also about how do you take that imagination and use a 3D printer for instance or a sewing machine to to make it into hardware and make it into something tangible yeah that's great so she's often debugging you know things that aren't running so so playing the technology role as we all do yes okay um Regina had a really great question that came in earlier um I really love your Insight about needing to see other ways of being and working in order to imagine those other possibilities for your future career it strikes me that not everyone has the opportunity or opportunities to see what different careers look like and in particular women may have less exposure to traditionally male careers or may not see themselves in these careers do you have any tips for how adult women might get more exposure to different career possibilities and also what can we do as adults to expose non-traditional career paths to more young women yeah um you know I I think that's where um this information interviewing approach can be helpful you know is is identifying some domains and this is the exercise we go through with our students is is where is a domain that you're curious about and it may be um medical Technologies um or it may be Transportation or it may be senior care you know that attracts you in terms of an area that you might want to imagine yourself working and then try to figure out who some individuals are there and and I think LinkedIn has made this easier in terms of scouting out who's in what area and and be bold enough to say you're interesting can I understand more about what what you do um it's probably harder to say can I Shadow you but really helping them talk to you about what is your day like you know what are some of the joys you get what are some of the hard points um are there choices that you wish you had hadn't made you know in terms of what you're doing what education was needed what education do you wish it had you know so so being bold enough to get out there and ask questions in terms of Role Models so um one of the things I do with the Emmy women's group that I mentioned is we put on a seminar series every winter quarter called women's perspectives and it's been around for about 20 years and um in the fall I sit down with the leadership the graduate student women to brainstorm on interesting people we want to have an excuse to invite to campus to talk and we really look at diversity in terms of of where in the world they're working what they're working on um their age you know we have some women who come who are in their 30s some women who come that are in their 70s and they tell pretty different picture different pictures um depending on their stage of Life some who've chosen the academic route some who've not who've gone to government we once had a science writer you know who had done a PhD in mechanical engineering because like your question implies people are really hungry for stories and seeing the diversity of those and seeing the lumpiness along the way you know so we tell the speakers just don't make it all look wonderful because we we really know you've had some bumps in the road and you know sometimes speakers will will talk about depression and needing to take breaks or along with success stories so um so we're all hungry for that um and and really as a way of trying on you know that that could be a path for me or that I don't want to go that way yeah I think I think also for me a couple of things are asking people like what does your average day look like because sometimes you have in your mind like what that thing is but then in reality it's not that thing and some and if you get too far down that path right you're like oh I wanna and you know maybe you heard someone say one day like oh you're really good at math you should be an accountant and you don't really know what else you want to do so you kind of grab onto that but then you meet an accountant and it you know if you if you could meet an accountant and say what is your average day look like maybe that's not at all what you want to be doing and and you know the the physics teacher might have said to that student you're good in math do engineering oh yeah yeah oh yeah 100 and if you don't have a solid sense of yourself you find yourself going towards that path of something that really isn't meant for you so I think it'd just be no curious about what comes natural to you identifying like what you like to do in a day yeah and then even like going to LinkedIn like you said or putting in Google like I like to do this what are these careers like get basic yeah yeah you know that's okay and basic and also open-minded yeah some of those things could be packaged in in job titles that you're you're new to you yeah yeah and it's really a changing landscape in terms of of skills and how they those get packaged absolutely and and just finding other people that have they're doing things that you like and you look at their job title like oh that's what that job title does I mean the question also brings up this interesting possibility so I mean with students you know whether they be undergraduate or graduate students we we encourage them to do internships and those are really trial jobs of you know what is it like to be an engineer at Boeing or at a startup or go to a venture capital firm and you know they can try them on for three months or six months and then come back and and and kind of reflect and and how does that affect their courses and where else they might want to do internships why aren't there adult internships I don't know Sherry that's what we need because there's such low stakes way because I think sometimes people will get into things and then they're already concerned about well I I am already here and I said this but but the internship is such a finite discreet thing yeah three months this is what you do and then you're doing like oh I was like a little Buffet a little sampler platter yeah I totally agree let's have an adult internship um okay couple more and then we're going to talk about the yes trap okay um what are your go-to resources for designing your life what do you tell people uh okay um so one would be read Bernie's book oh um yep the other is Bill Burnett and Dave Evans have um two books out on designing your life okay um and it is based on on this series of courses um that included you know designing your Stanford experience designing your life for juniors and seniors to think about next steps and then we have this version designing the professional that's for graduate students and so the those books really capture a lot of the tools um in in thinking about what is your world view you know when you when you write kind of about your purpose in life and what you think would be a fulfilling life is that consistent with writing your work View and um and so there's exercises of of writing those and then then seeing are they consistent with one another um there's also this strategy of information interviewing which I've already talked about you know where we get students out prototyping if you will possible career paths or job domains so that's another part of it and then the the course and I their book also gets this idea of writing an odyssey plan and not just drawing one of them but writing three of them and each of them need to be pretty different and still encapsulate your work and your world view and recognizing that there are different ways to use math in a career right um you know it could be as an accountant it could be as an engineer it could be as a statistician you know there's lots of ways to use that skill and and so you don't feel trapped to say this is the only path for me and then the exercise takes what you think is the most cohesive of those three and actually write a 10-year plan um so you can capture a lot of those exercises in in that in their books okay great thank you and the one you held up was the achievement habit by Bernie Roth okay yeah great yeah excellent thank you okay good all right let's see um der Kira said she loves libraries too so there's again another another plug for the library and um Laura just wanted to say thank you for sharing your story about crying I've cried in front of every male boss I have ever had and it took me a long time to realize it isn't something to be embarrassed about but it's an opportunity to normalize the display of human emotion I'm here for that as well yeah yeah and I would say I came to the realization of not being embarrassed that I was crying you know that I would actually cry in front of particularly this one chair um and that part of I didn't want to cry because I didn't want him to feel bad but I was past worrying about him feeling bad yeah that's how I felt yeah yeah yeah I think we spent a lot of time caretaking other people yeah yeah when really we should just yeah cry yeah cry what okay what do we have we have cry we have adult internships right right yeah um we have find your groups right find your people and and you know reach out to people and say you're interesting can I have five or ten minutes of your your time who is gonna say no to that yeah I agree okay can you tell us about the yes trap okay so um you know I want to talk a little bit about this idea of a yes trap and and you know I've said yes to many things in life um you know I said yes to going down an engineering path um I said yes when a group of other professors approached me in my second year as a an assistant professor here and said we're going to put together a proposal for a grant that's on engineering education and um at the time that was kind of a wacky idea that that research was supposed to be about technical things my my area of work was in structures and fatigue and fracture and welded structures um so I said yes to that um and you know I said yes to Professor couragian about teaching that night class and I'm glad I said yes but what I have gotten stronger believing is when you say yes what is the no and so I made a mistake when I said yes to engineering because I said no to music and my conception of Music at that time is I'm I can do it professionally and are I'm not going to do it at all so the yes wasn't a mistake but the no was a mistake and so I brought Gertrude my ukulele because I'm back to actually making music now um after after many years and um so that no has turned into a reframed um way of being so that was too Stark of a no at the time when I was starting College the second example about saying yes to um the colleagues who approached me about becoming part of this big NSF Grant um that my Administration was really discouraging me from doing saying you know this this really is not a good thing for you to do was I did not say no soon enough to all the other things I was doing so for about 20 years I kept a dual life going of doing research in engineering education along with doing research on fatigue and fracture and to be perfectly honest with you it was exhausting because I was trying to be a major player in two different fields and I wish really wish I had said no sooner you know after I'd gotten my feet under me about engineering education to say I could put that down you know I've done good work there and I'm moving on to something else so those are examples of really needing to think about yes but at the same time what is what is the no associated with it you know in in thinking about also saying yes you know I recognize I want to make sure that I get these points that sometimes I say yes because nobody else volunteers you know I'll be at a table and you know somebody needs to organize the next meeting or write up what we just did or bring in some other resources or you know and and I I often after that awkward pause will say yes because nobody else is going to do it I sometimes say yes and I'm recognizing this because I I confuse quantity of work with quality of work and maybe saying more things that I'm doing that I've said yes to I you know it makes me feel more important or seem more important because of all of that yes that I've done so you know I've learned to recognize that those are not good reasons for saying yes to something um and and Bernie if you read in his book you know he'll say all reasons are and that's that's a quote from Bernie in in here um I have come up with a strategy though of a set of questions I asked myself before I say yes and I've got them listed here to make sure that um I've I've got them all and then I'll loop back to saying why did I say yes to you um so the first is can I do what is being asked me um you know is is it in my my wheelhouse so to speak of things that that I can do will I do it you know or will I just let a deadline pass and and just have said yes but not actually come through with with what's being asked will I be happy doing what is being asked me and I think that one is increasingly on my list and and that happiness includes who am I going to be working with on this you know are these really cool people that just there's going to be joy in hanging out with them in doing this and interacting with them um and this one has become more and Marquee the fourth one is will I be learning something when I'm doing what is being asked for me you know if if it's a um the same old same old then there's not going to be a learning opportunity um there and and I've I've realized that I'm I'm a learning addict you know that that idea of of being in a field where I don't know all of it and and that messiness of learning is important for for me in terms of a source of energy fifth question will somebody else benefit from my saying yes um you know so really thinking about a larger Community graduate students I've had undergraduates I've had colleagues and if I say yes to this is it going to help somebody else's career or pathway um would somebody else benefit from my saying no and so recognizing that maybe that talk that I've been asked to give I could do it I could learn but actually a junior colleague might benefit more career-wise by my saying no in my recommending them as as a good person to take it on and then seventh and this is probably the hardest one for me that I still struggle with what will I put down if I pick this up so recognizing um you know getting out by on five hours of sleep is not a reasonable thing to do in life by just continuing to pile more and more on so going back to your asking me to do this um can I do what is being asked of me yeah I think I can probably talk about myself will I do what is being asked for me yes because Matt Harvey was one of the people who suggested it and I really respect my Matt and I'm going to come through for him you know when he asks and I say yes will I be happy doing what is being asking me yes you know Matt is a fun person to work with and our first engagements were fun so I thought yeah I'm going to be happy will I be learning something new and that one was interesting because I went back and looked at the recordings of the the prior two speakers and I really loved that each in their unique way personalized it and it didn't have PowerPoint slides so for me it was a challenge of of how to tell my story in a way that was engaging that brought in some art you know so so I was learning a new way of thinking about my story so that was cool will someone else benefit from my saying yes I hope all of you um and and I've benefited again from from thinking about how I package or tell my story in in a different way um would someone else benefit from my saying no I actually thought about this and who else could I recommend um but decided not because it was kind of a short time frame and and a lot of people are busy getting the quarter started um and then what will I put down if I pick this up I have to admit I didn't put anything down and I had lots of fun preparing this so it was good oh thank you I love that checklist and thank you so much for sure it was nice to see that in action and kind of how you thought about it is is you went through it and now that you have told your story in this way do you have other opportunities or applications that you can see this applying to the telling it this story in this way yeah yeah yeah maybe for the me group or maybe for the Emmy maybe for my um my actually my research team um because you know there's about 10 people in that team and they're asking questions about what's their pathway and and you know I think I do recognize some of them look at me out you're the success successful Professor you've always been that um and it may open up a conversation with them yeah it was not a linear path at all yeah oh for sure and I think that a lot of us have that idea in our head that it's going to look like a certain way and when it doesn't inevitably look like that yeah then we're comparing our insides with everyone else's outsides yeah and that's where we cry yeah absolutely um let's see a couple of people what is the book title for Bernie's book it is the achievement habit yeah the achievement habit Bernard Roth yeah um okay so I think that we have answered everyone that is that has come in with a question um if anybody else has anything else we'll be around here for a couple of more minutes um Sherry that was just great on so many levels I learned a lot so so selfishly thank you you're welcome thank you so much and it's always a great highlight part of my day when I can sit and have a conversation with just someone who I admire and I think is so interesting and for you to come on and tell your story behind the story I definitely took a lot of nuggets from that absolutely and I saw a lot of overlap too um so thank you for that and I would say you know this career path is ever evolving um you know you you acknowledged in my title that I've retired I'm actually on 50 recall for the next two years Stanford has this program what does that mean um that's I'm struggling with that okay struggling with it in three ways um it's 50 what's the number you know I usually work 50 to 60 hours okay so is it 50 of that or is it 50 of a normal 40 hour a week job so that's the first part the second struggle is when I figure out that number what to keep in and what to put out you know really acknowledging this is an opportunity to say what would I like to have stickiness here at Stanford after I'm gone right so who are my new partners or who what are Partnerships I want to strengthen so that other people are taking things I've started and continuing them what are things that only I care about and I could put them down and no one would notice and then what are new things I want to be taking on that I will continue even after I'm fully retired so so that's kind of the second part of the struggle and then the third part is I realize I cannot Care at 50 percent that when I do something I'm carrying a hundred and ten percent and so really recognizing with whatever I'm doing that smaller set that I've got the space to really put my my heart and soul and hands into it and and so I think that's really the hardest one is recognizing that I care a lot right and since you're going to Care 110 you need to be especially spec