My gREaTEST ChaLLENgE CONTiNUES
The journal article noted that women who pursue careers in male-dominated science and engineering disciplines often face daunting challenges in advancing their careers. Additionally, mentoring projects, such as the Women Mentoring Women program at Yale University, have helped to elevate the opportunities that arise from women mentoring other women.
Mentors like Randolph provide a foundation for inexperienced but talented women engineers such as Bernard to grow intel- lectually by providing both technical and psychosocial support. Advancing within the technical organization is perhaps a woman engineer’s greatest challenge, according to observers.
“We have become friends through this experience,” Ber- nard, a native of Grand Rapids, MI, says. “I was originally hired into Tami’s group, but because of the Future Technical Leader program I started rotating into different groups. I am now at a different building, but we still try to make time to get together and have lunch.”
in 1993 and 1994. When hired into Northrop in 2001, she became the company’s first woman and first minor- ity to join her two-year-old leading edge development group. She has managed five programs totaling about $10 million and more than 50 employees during her time at Northrop. Her current assignment is leading a Northrop cross-sector, multimillion dollar classified capture and ex- ecution effort for U.S. intelligence.
Bernard, besides her participation as a Northrop Future Technical Leader, won academic honors as a Vanderbilt engineering under- graduate and earned summer undergraduate research fellow- ships at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Gaithersburg, MD. In her short time at Northrop, one of her achievements is writing a pro- posal for a $384,000 Department of Defense contract proposal for biometrics research.
Dr. Tami R. Randolph
Despite their different research focuses, the linchpin for their relationship remains on advancing opportunities for exciting technol- ogy developments through their work at Northrop, according to
Bernard also notes that the friendship extends to interact- ing as well with Randolph’s family, including her young daughter, at events outside of the workplace.
In turn, Randolph calls Bernard “a likeable one.”
“You’re working with people all day. Either you like them or you don’t. It’s really good to not only find someone you can bring in and mentor, but also someone you can share time with,” she says.
Yet Randolph and Bernard’s mentor-mentee relationship should not be obscured by their fondness for each other. Both are serious engineering scholars and technologists.
In addition to her doctorate, Randolph earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering respectively from Stanford University and Georgia Tech
Randolph and Bernard. In fact, just because they are men- tor and mentee, doesn’t mean they always agree, Bernard says.
“When it comes down to where do we want to take the technology, we have different opinions on what the next step should be. Having those different opinions leads us in multiple directions. But we learn from each other about how to apply the technology in different areas that we may not have thought about individually but somehow together it synergistically appears,” Bernard says.
And that is the reward of mentoring on technology, Ran- dolph adds.
“You find adjacent markets and the technology grows. Technologies are applicable to a lot of things. GPS (global positioning satellite devices) didn’t start off as, ‘Where is my house?’ You find that with a lot of technologies,” she says.
by M.V. Greene,
mgreene@ccgmag.com 74 WOMENOFCOLOR | FALL 2010
www.womenofcolor.net
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