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From: seltzer@ernie.Berkeley.EDU (Linda Seltzer)
Newsgroups: comp.society.women
Subject: Mentors, career profiles, et. al.
Message-ID: <6559@ecsvax.UUCP>
Date: 22 Feb 89 01:52:59 GMT
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To the person conducting a survey about mentoring?

Before I changed my field to music, I worked at Bell Labs as an MTS,
including working in acoustics research.  During my undergraduate years
and my studies for the M.S. I had no real mentor.  A few people
encouraged me, but most of the professors were too busy with their
own research to spend time providing students with mentoring and
guidance.  As for parents - they thwarted me at every turn when I
was growing up - definitely no encouragement there.   

There were no computers in high schools when I was young.  Even in
college all we had was Fortran on data cards.  I really didn't get
involved in computers until I was studying for my M.S. in EE,
and I didn't get really good training until I took in-house courses
at Bell Labs.   The in-house courses there made it possible for
people without a lot of previous training to become productive
in software.