Question 17

My major experience integrating research and education has been
participating in the Lumberjack Project at Wellesley College. This
research project was started by Professor Franklyn Turbak two years
ago and has involved several computer science students at Wellesley in
research on implementing and comparing methods for deforestation. I
worked on this project part-time during my sophomore and junior years,
and full-time this past summer, and am now writing a senior thesis as
part of the project. Being able to participate in research while an
undergraduate has strongly encouraged me to continue in a research career.

One of my current contributions to my community is running Wilbur, the
Wellesley College student Web server. I have been involved with
running Wilbur since my first year at Wellesley. Wellesley does not
provide Web space on an official server for students, so Wilbur is the
only option for students who wish to have a Web page in the Wellesley
domain and cannot set up their own servers. Until a year ago, Wilbur
was run by a small, unofficial collection of students; at that point,
I formed WILBUR (the Wellesley Institute for Linux Based User
Re-empowerment) and constituted it as an official student
organization, with me as president. WILBUR has been involved with
providing Web space and educating students about Web design since its
inception, and once we obtain a new server, we plan to extend our
services to provide Unix shell access to the student body and educate
students about text-based computer systems. (Wellesley does not
currently have any reliable public Unix systems.)

My other major contribution to my community is serving as Business
Manager for WZLY, Wellesley's student-run radio station. I am wholly
responsible for WZLY's efforts to broadcast on the Web, which just
began this year. WZLY does not have a powerful enough transmitter to
reach even certain locations on the Wellesley campus, so by setting up
the Web broadcasting server, I helped make it possible for the entire
Wellesley community (as well as the world) to enjoy WZLY's diverse
musical offerings.

As for diversity in science, I attended the International Conference
on Functional Programming this fall, and was amazed at the lack of
female participants there. Women in computer science seem to be
clustered in a few subfields, and programming languages isn't one of
them. As a woman doing research in this subfield, I am making a
contribution to diversity and hope to someday inspire other women to do the
same.