December 7, 2006
Visiting lecturer underscores growing bond between UW and schools focusing on minority populations
By Sibrina Collins
The Graduate School
This fall the University took a step toward its goal of building relationships with minority-serving institutions and historically black colleges and universities when it hosted Andrew Williams, a professor in the Department of Computer Science at Spelman College in Atlanta, Ga. Williams was here at the invitation of Richard Ladner, Boeing professor in Computer Science and Engineering, to give a talk focusing on his research efforts at Spelman, an historically black college for women in Atlanta.
Ladner believes that building relations with minority-serving institutions like Spelman can be beneficial. “When I met Professor Williams earlier this year, I knew immediately that he could help my department learn how to mount successful outreach programs,” Ladner said. “Minority-serving institutions and historically black colleges and universities have a long history of providing quality education and outreach to their communities. We at the UW need to build relationships with these colleges and universities for our mutual benefit. I will continue to work with Professor Williams on projects to build the relationship between Spelman and the UW.”
Next spring, Ladner plans to pay a return visit to Spelman College.
Suzanne Ortega, dean of the UW Graduate School, believes that faculty exchanges between minority-serving institutions and Research I institutions are critical for the scientific workforce. “We are absolutely thrilled that Professor Williams was able to join us for a series of very productive talks this fall and are equally delighted that Professor Ladner will be spending time at Spelman this spring,” she said. “Clearly, high-quality graduate education and a robust U.S. scientific labor force depend on just this type of faculty exchange.”
Juan Guerra, associate dean of the Graduate School and Graduate Opportunities and Minority Achievement Program (GO-MAP), believes that visiting minority-serving institutions and building relationships with faculty are critical to increasing diversity at the UW. “Expanded outreach efforts, specifically what I call ‘P’s and R’s’ — partnerships and pathways, recruitment and retention — are crucial to our efforts at the UW, because the traditional ways of recruiting students are not working. As part of these efforts, it is absolutely critical to build productive relationships with the faculty,” Guerra said.
During his visit, Williams gave a talk focusing on computer science innovation and the role of diversity, specifically emphasizing the importance of partnering with Research I institutions to build a pipeline of computer scientists. But he provided the audience with some “essential attitudes” when building partnerships with minority-serving institutions. “It is important to recognize that these institutions are smaller, but not less valuable,” he said. “You have to respect the relationship, not just the task that needs to be done.”
Other tips he provided included visiting the minority-serving institutions, meeting key people, demonstrating a willingness to collaborate, and making contact very early — not the week before a proposal needs to be submitted for funding consideration.
Williams described a collaborative relationship between Spelman College and Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) that includes an expanded outreach component to middle school students. The Spelman-CMU partnership includes the Computer And Robotics Education (CARE) summer camps for middle school students and the development of a cognitive robotics course for undergraduate students. “The goals of CARE are to expose and recruit African American middle school students into the computing fields,” he said.
Spelman’s efforts in computing have reached international levels due to the recent success of the SpelBots (Spelman Robotics). In 2005, the SpelBots team, which consists of seven members, participated in the International RoboCup competition in Osaka, Japan. The RoboCup is the world championships of robotics, and the SpelBots were one of 24 teams to qualify globally. Although the SpelBots didn’t take home first prize, they still are winners — specifically, they were the first all-female African American team from an historically black college or university to participate in this competition. In 2006, the SpelBots team also competed in the RoboCup competition in Bremen, Germany.
During his visit to the campus, Williams met with several UW professors and ended his talk by discussing ideas for broadening participation in the computing field. Specific ideas discussed were the mutual commitment to the pipeline, enjoyable summer research experiences for Spelman students at the UW, and making computing research attractive to women. The highlight of Williams’ talk was the CNN film describing the SpelBots’ experiences in Japan. Several Spelman students compared being a member of the SpelBots to being a rock star.
The UW is making progress with diversity on campus. Currently, 8 percent of UW graduate students are under-represented minority students, which is about 50 percent higher than it was five years ago. Although these are small increases, many divisions and units on the UW campus such as GO-MAP, Office of Minority Affairs and several interdisciplinary science and technology centers are working tirelessly to increase diversity at the UW. Thus, building partnerships with minority serving institutions such as Spelman are critical to broadening participation in all disciplines.
