When Sneha Sinha accepted an operations management internship at the Target Fulfillment Center in Albany, she expected to shadow her boss for ten weeks. After her first few weeks on the job, however, he was promoted.
“I was in a really unique position,” she said. “I got to step into that role and really own it. It was overwhelming at first, leading a team of people of different ages and backgrounds. But I love to get outside of my comfort zone.”
Somayeh Pasebani grew up in a family of eight children in Tehran, Iran, where her father owned a small auto mechanic shop. As a young girl, Pasebani took things apart, trying to understand how they worked, but she often couldn’t figure out how to put them back together again.
When people are passionate about what they do, it’s inspiring.
Students at Crescent Valley High School learn to program robots to play a simple version of Candyland with the help of Oregon State undergraduates. Photo by Rachel Robertson.
An electric fuse is a well-known safety device designed to prevent damage when an electrical panel, wiring, or circuit is overloaded.
In “Star Wars,” R2-D2 is the perfect example of a likable and effective robot. Though he looks and sounds nothing like a human — with no face or hands, and communicating with only whistles and beeps — he clearly has a connection to his human co-workers.
“R2-D2 does a good job of illustrating that he’s paying attention. That’s important for people, especially in a collaborative scenario where you really want to understand what the other person needs,” said Heather Knight, an assistant professor of computer science at Oregon State University’s College of Engineering.
Mary Jacobsen balances gymnastics and a computer science degree. Photo by Bonnie Vick, courtesy of Oregon State Athletics.
Teamwork comes naturally to Mary Jacobsen, an Oregon State University gymnast and computer science student in the College of Engineering.
Attending the world’s largest gathering of women technologists was transformational for Stephanie Hughes, a computer science undergraduate. But it wasn’t enough for her.
“I was just one person and I wanted to make sure other women at Oregon State had that experience,” said Hughes who is the president of Oregon State’s women’s chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM-W OSU).
In the 1980s, only about 1 in 16 American engineers was a woman. That proportion is a lot higher in the Wong family. Of six sisters, five became engineers, and all five graduated with engineering degrees from Oregon State University.
The five sisters are Pam Wong (’79 B.S.,Industrial Engineering), May Wong Knotts (’80 B.S., Mechanical Engineering), Sun Noble (’84 B.S., Civil Engineering), Michelle Wei Wong Lostra (’85 B.S., Civil Engineering), and Lai Wong-Smith (’86 B.S., Computer Science).
