91视频

After serving as the dean of the College of Engineering at Colorado State University for seven years, Sandra Woods is preparing to take the same position at Oregon State University, where she started her career as an engineer in 1984.

While at CSU, Woods helped build a $71 million interdisciplinary research and teaching facility. Additionally, she developed a variety of programs to increase interdisciplinary collaboration and diversity in the engineering field. One of these programs 鈥� created to help high school girls learn more about engineering 鈥� recently was honored with the WEPAN Women in Engineering Initiative Award.

Woods, who hopes to establish similar programs at OSU and expand the scope of what engineering students can accomplish, recently spoke with the 91视频.

91视频: After the success you’ve experienced at Colorado State University, why are you choosing to return to Oregon State University?

Sandra Woods: It’s like coming home for me. Oregon State’s program is growing, and it’s an opportunity for me to go back to an institute I care about and help them meet some new goals. The former dean did just a great job, but there are some areas I think I can help with. There’s an extraordinary amount of potential there.

91视频: What are some of your main goals?

Woods: Some of the programs I’m most interested in working on are things that are at the intersection of disciplines. Those areas are in some sense fuzzier, because they take many different disciplines to really address these difficult problems of health, energy or the environment. I think they are doing a very good job on that now, but I think I would like to help increase the amount of interdisciplinary collaboration.

I also want to increase the work on the diversity of the student body. I think they’ve established a wonderful program, but I think there some areas I could maybe help expand with my experience.

91视频: There’s a common perception that women have traditionally been underrepresented in the field of engineering. Today, do you believe that disparity is still significant?

Woods: If you look at the undergraduate level, less than 19 percent of engineering enrollment is female. And that 19 percent or so has been really not moving much over the last 10 years; it’s sort of stuck. I’ve always worked on trying to develop programs that would increase the representation of women and underrepresented minorities in engineering education.

In industry or government, when you have a more diverse workforce, you have better solutions for problems. You have a greater diversity of thought, because you have people from different backgrounds developing solutions for problems. And you just get a better solution.

There’s also the fairness aspect. Engineering and computer science are great careers and there’s a large number of people that aren’t accessing those.

91视频: What do you think that disparity could be attributed to?

Woods: There have been studies for decades about that. You lose a lot of girls very early; they often say third grade. They’re convinced it’s not a career for them. What we’ve been trying to do here at Colorado State and what I’ll try to continue at Oregon State is something called 鈥渃hanging the conversation鈥� 鈥� how to talk about engineering differently so it recruits a more diverse group of students.

There’s many different ways to be an engineer. All civil engineers don’t do the same thing, and all chemical engineers don’t do the same thing. By talking about engineering and what you can do to serve society 鈥� addressing human health, addressing the environment, developing technology that makes people’s lives better 鈥� you start to recruit a different group of students.

At CSU, we just got an award for our recruiting classes for women. We base that program on how we talk about engineering and how we recruit students to engineering, and we saw a doubling of women in our freshman class. I’m hoping to start something similar to that at Oregon State when I go back there.

91视频: Is there anything that could be done at education levels like middle school and high school to pique girls’ interest in engineering?

Woods: One is to educate the teachers. Here at CSU, we developed a program to help educate engineers to become teachers. Think of how many students the teacher will influence over their career. It’s also about educating the teachers and bringing them into the university and helping them to understand how engineering is changing and what sort of careers are available.

You just lose girls all the way through high school. They make choices about what they want to do based on what they think an engineer is. We just have to talk about it differently.

91视频: What sort of challenges have you faced personally in the field?

Woods: I got my bachelor’s degree in the ’70s, and things are very different now. I experienced in my early career as an engineer some very blatant discrimination 鈥� being told that no women have ever been project managers and none ever will. In higher education, I’ve not experienced those sorts of issues.

One thing that I think is important for faculty, department heads and deans is to create a culture that really promotes diversity and to be very proactive in addressing issues. You want the climate in the college to be accepting of all students.

So, to be honest, the kinds of discrimination in the ’70s 鈥� you don’t see that today; it’s illegal. But women still deal with that on a daily basis; it’s just more subtle than it was 30 or 40 years ago.

91视频: Do you believe engineering firms put enough effort into finding female engineers when looking to fill positions?

Woods: I can’t speak for all employers. Small employers may not be making a great effort. But I can tell you as we meet with corporate sponsors in the industry, they recognize the importance of this idea of having a diversity of thought. As we have diversified our student body here at CSU, we have found even more corporate partners that want to work with us and hire our students because we bring a more diverse group of potential employees to them. But small firms that have only a few employees may not be making a big effort.

91视频: Universities everywhere are dealing with shrinking budgets and rising tuitions. How is this impacting the engineering school and how it does its job?

Woods: Both Colorado State and Oregon State are land-grant institutions, and 10 years ago the state (bore) the largest cost of a student’s education; but in the last several years that’s flipped. Now the students bear the largest share of the cost. Because of that, students with financial need find it difficult to attend college or think it will be more difficult.

For most universities, as tuition increases, they will put a large fraction of that increase into financial aid to help those students. Land-grant institutions were created to provide access to higher education for everyone, regardless of their financial needs.

We’re always trying to raise funds for more scholarships for students and create opportunities for internships or co-ops so that they can basically work their way through school. It’s a responsibility of the university to help those students.