To: Keith Winstein <keithw@...>
If you can spare a few minutes to respond via email, it would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you.
I guess I would say "welcome"!! I hope you find computer science
rewarding and look forward to reading your contributions to the field
over time. There are so many diverse ways to be a computer scientist and
to do computer science. I hope your early years in the field end up
exposing you broadly and sparking your interest.
One
thing I would say is that it's valuable to find good mentors, people
you look up to and whose examples you can try to "live up" to and from
whom you can learn as much as possible. A lot of undergraduates
unfortunately become fixated on their own classmates, and worry about
trying to "keep up" with these people or "catch up" to their level of
preparation. In the grand scheme of things, these people are not so
important -- in my experience, it's more valuable to have goals, and
mentors and heroes who embody those goals and serve as an example for
you to try to "live up" to over the many years of your (hopefully long)
education and career. Of course it may take you a while to figure out
what kind of person you want to become and who you want to look up to.
:-)
I did a (brief) interview on my experience here: https://alum.mit.edu/slice/
And a different interview about graduate school here: https://cs.stanford.edu/~keithw/interview-2015-guo-wu-winstein.html
Some advice you may want to read: Justine Sherry's (https://people.eecs.berkeley.
The
second thing I would say is that there are a lot of great events for
women in computer science, and a lot of people I know really enjoy and
are inspired by attending them! So, attend the Grace Hopper Celebration (https://ghc.anitab.org/),
both while you're in high school and continuing in college, at least if you can make it and if it looks interesting to you. (This is
probably the biggest one.) Consider attending an ACM-W event or
starting an ACM-W chapter (https://women.acm.org/
The
third thing I would say is to read a lot of books. Computer science is a
broad field, and there are so many ways to experience and enjoy and
contribute to it. It's helpful to have some exposure to different parts
of the field. Some of the great ones include:
Keith- Hofstadter, "Godel, Escher, Bach" (can be a life-changing book)
- Hofstadter, "Metamagical Themas" (also a really fun read if you liked G.E.B.)
- Gardner, "aha! Gotcha" -- fun book about paradoxes
- "How to Design Programs," and do the assignments (free online: https://www.htdp.org/)
- Abelson and Sussman, "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs," also free online
- Levy, "Hackers: Heroes of the Information Revolution" by Steven Levy (this is a fun story about the history of "hackers" and a bit about Silicon Valley)
- Steiglitz, "A Digital Signal Processing Primer: With Applications to Digital Audio and Computer Music" -- this was a life-changing book for me when I read it the summer before college. Computer science (and EECS) is about more than just programming!
- Sipser, "Introduction to the Theory of Computation" -- this is a junior-level textbook but you might be ready for it and enjoy it -- it's a great book
Number four, read these famous (and semi-depressing?) essays that every high-school student should read:
Good luck, and please feel free to get in touch again if I can be helpful,- Ursula Le Guin, "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas": https://www.utilitarianism.
com/nu/omelas.pdf - C.S. Lewis, "The Inner Ring": https://www.lewissociety.org/
innerring/
