March 3, 2015
March is National Engineering Month, and to celebrate The NSERC/Pratt & Whitney Chair for Women in Science and Engineering for Ontario is asking 30 intrepid women to discuss why they engineer.
The first featured interviewee, Professor Natalie Enright Jerger of The Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering explains “#iEngineer because pushing the boundaries of technology is exciting and rewarding.”
Read the full conversation with Professor Enright Jerger below, and meet the other 29 women featured in the series.
A Conversation with Natalie
What is your current job?
I am an associate professor in the department of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Toronto. My job includes teaching graduate and undergraduate courses in computer engineering and mentoring and supervising graduate students in their research. I am also involved in various service activities such as journal editorial boards and technical program committees.
What is your favourite part of your job?
Working with students. Helping students first understand various engineering concepts is really inspiring. Working with graduate students to help them realize their research potential and sharing in their excitement when a research idea pans out or a paper is accepted for publication is very rewarding.
How has your degree in engineering helped your career?
Doing cutting-edge research and having the opportunity to teach at a world-class university would not be possible without an advanced degree in engineering. I realized early on at university that I wanted a career in research and teaching and set myself on a course to achieve that goal.
What surprised you about a career in engineering?
How people-oriented it is. When I went through university, there was a prevailing stereotype that engineers were nerdy guys toiling away in front of their computers alone. I think some of that stereotype may exist but I find engineering to be highly collaborative — every day, I’m working with students, other faculty and industrial partners; we are doing research that can have tremendous impact on people’s daily lives.
What has been the most enjoyable or interesting project you’ve been involved in?
Together with my graduate students, we’ve been doing a number of very exciting projects to design higher performance and more engineering efficient processors. Faster, better, cheaper processors are an enabling technology for research and development in a wide range of fields from science to medicine to economics. It’s exciting to be think of all the possibilities that exist because of modern computing technology and that we are contributing to the next generation of that technology.
Why did you decide to pursue a career in this location/field?
In terms of field, I choose computer engineering because I was really fascinated by computers when I was a child. Computers were not ubiquitous or common place when I was growing up — it was fairly unusual to have a home computer. The computer we had was truly a black box — you couldn’t look inside and see how it worked. So, I went to university to understand the inner workings of a computer and fell in love with the field of computer architecture, which is the study of processor design. In terms of location, I came to Toronto from the U.S. because it offered a world-class university and department with terrific undergraduate students and cutting-edge research. Toronto also appealed to me as a fantastic place to live with tremendous diversity and culture.
What is your vision or dream for women in engineering in the next 25 years?
U of T Engineering recently announced that more than 30 per cent of our first year class is female. This is a great milestone, yet the numbers of female students in electrical and computer engineering are lagging behind as are the number of women in prominent engineering leadership positions. In the next 25 years, I’d love to see equal numbers of men and women in our computer engineering program and women rising in great numbers to key academic and corporate leadership positions. It might seem small, but I think just having female role models in engineering helps young women stay in the profession. I hope to continue to lead by example and mentor young women. My career has been helped tremendously by some wonderful mentors and I’d like to pay that forward to the next generation of engineers.
What advice do you have for young women pursuing a career in your field?
When I was in graduate school, I first learned of the “imposter syndrome” from a friend of mine. With the imposter syndrome, high-achievers often chalk their successes up to luck rather than ability. Knowing that I was not alone in feeling this way and putting a name to it, helped me to start appreciating my accomplishments for what they were and that was quite freeing. So, my advice to young women in the field would be to fight to believe in yourself even when you feel that you don’t belong and to create a strong network of friends and mentors to support and encourage you along the way.
Read the other profiles. More on National Engineering Month in Ontario.
More information:
Marit Mitchell
Senior Communications Officer
The Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering
416-978-7997; marit.mitchell@utoronto.ca