Named for Vassar alumna, pioneer in field

Brian Farkas News Editor

Six Computer Science students, accompanied by Assistant Professor of Computer Science Jennifer Walter and two alumnae, will attend one of the field’s most prestigious conferences for women in Orlando, Fla. Nicole Rosard ’08, Claire Crawford ’08, Gabriela Dumitrescu ’09, Anca Sarb ’09, Elise Stickles ’09, Alison Abreu-Garcia ’08, Joy Kamunyori ’05 and Natalia Gonzalez ’04 will spend part of their October Break learning about opportunities in the field.

The four-day Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing (GHC) will begin on Oct. 17. With over 1,300 expected to attend, the conference includes leading women from industry and government, professors, researchers and students. Successful professionals will present papers, run panels and conduct workshops.

“The Grace Hopper Celebration provides a forum to inspire, educate, encourage and create awareness of opportunities for women in the field of computing and to celebrate the considerable achievement of women in the field,” said Walter. “This year’s theme, ‘I Invent the Future’, emphasizes the impact women have on the computing and technology fields.”

The conference is named after former U.S. Navy Admiral Grace Murray Hopper, who graduated from Vassar in 1928. She went on to teach mathematics at Vassar while conducting research on compilers and the development of the business language COBOL. She is widely considered to be a pioneer in the computing field.

The conference is part of an effort by the Vassar computer science department to attract more female students. Though female students make up 30 to 50 percent of introductory course enrollments, this percentage drops sharply in higher level courses. “The exodus of women between the introductory and upper levels of Computer Science is a nationwide phenomenon that some experts think is caused by students’ perceptions that research in computer science causes social isolation,” said Walter.

Following the lead of Computer Science departments at peer institutions, Walter founded a group called Vassar Women in Computer Science (VWiCS) in 2005. “The idea was to organize social events that would bring together the women who had already declared a major or correlate in computer science with those who were just beginning the introductory courses, in the hopes of creating a community of women in computer science,” she said.

The female faculty of Vassar’s computer science department are no strangers to success. Professor and chair of the department Nancy Ide recently received a National Science Foundation grant of nearly $1 million to code linguistic information to a large corpus of contemporary American English texts.

Walter also received an award from the National Science Foundation so she and her students can conduct summer research with the Parasol Robotics Group at Texas A&M University on the development and simulation of motion-planning algorithms for self-reconfigurable robots.

When one of the VWiCS members alerted her to the fact that the GHC was offering travel grants to students on a competitive basis, Walter urged the 20 VWiCS members to apply. The grant application required students to submit two letters of reference, an essay, and a resume. Over 900 women from around the world applied for the grants, and one of the VWiCS members, Rosard, received a full scholarship to attend the conference. Walter secured funds through a generous endowment established by Winifred Asprey ’38 to fund the expenses of the five other students.

During her time at Vassar, Asprey was a student of Hopper’s. Asprey then became a professor of mathematics at Vassar and was the driving force behind the creation of the computer science program. Predicting that computers would eventually become crucial to a liberal arts education, she secured a partnership with IBM, which had a research institute located on the Vassar Farm. With the help of the company, along with the National Science Foundation, Asprey was able to help launch the Vassar’s first computer center in 1965.

Rosard, like most of the students attending the conference, is a computer science major. “I kind of enjoy the fact that at a school that has so many women, I'm in one of the only departments with the opposite ratios,” she said. This summer, Rosard did software development for a corporation.

“I found myself mostly surrounded by men, which I think is interesting. No one has every made me feel inferior because of my gender.” Rosard will be writing a research paper on gender differences in computer science. An article published by Former Professor and Chair of the Department of Computer Science Brad Richards, who taught her introductory class, inspired her to study the situation further.

“The paper concludes that men often have more pre-collegiate Computer Science experience,” she said of her research.

“It is nice to know that while I often find myself surrounded by men in the field, there are still women out there who are doing really innovative things,” said Rosard. She plans to pursue graduate work in computer science, after getting some work experience in the field.