WOMEN IN STEM
Senior Technical Woman Profile: Susan Landau, Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University
Susan Landau is the 2008 Women of
Vision Award winner for Social Impact and Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. 1. How did you decide to pursue a
career in technology? I started graduate school in mathemat- ics with a focus on algebra, but was par- ticularly interested in computation. I took a graduate course in the Cornell computer science
department in algorithms and
was hooked. I moved from mathemat- ics to computer science, doing a PhD in algebraic algorithms. I was an academic for sixteen years, during which time my interests shifted from developing algo- rithms and proving theorems about alge- braic problems to cybersecurity and pub- lic policy.
2. Based on your own experience, what skill(s) or characteristic(s) do you think are most important for technical women to succeed? Tenacity. Grit. A strong belief in your-
self.
Friends, friends who support you and friends who are also willing to push you sometimes when you waver or lose heart. Professional colleagues who believe in you.
And flexibility. The technical world changes quickly, and the skill set that served you well in the last decade might not do so in the future. You need to be willing to learn new things, work with new people, find a new niche. It’s the best way I know to have a successful career. 3. What was the greatest challenge that you overcame in your career? I started my career as an academ-
ic. When my husband didn’t get tenure, we found ourselves looking for positions while we had two small children and it was a bad job market. We moved to a situ- ation where my husband had tenure and I had a promise, but the promise was not in writing—and it was not honored. This led
36 PROFESSIONAL WOMAN’S MULTICULTURAL MAGAZINE
to a number of very rough years for me professionally. In the end—and the end took some
time to work out—I moved to Sun Mi- crosystems, where I stayed for eleven years and where I had a very rich and very fulfilling career. That I ended up in such a good situation was a matter of grit, te- nacity, and my unwillingness to settle for situations that I felt were not good profes- sionally—as well as the support of friends and professional colleagues,
one who was instrumental in my being hired at Sun.
(Now you know why I say grit, tenac-
ity, and the support of friends and col- leagues are so important.)
CELEBRATING 11 YEARS OF DIVERSITY 4. How do you manage work/life
balance? I don’t think there is any such
thing. When my children were little, sometimes work didn’t get enough at- tention, sometimes the kids didn’t. I did things like cut back on work—I applied for an NSF postdoc five years past my PhD to have time to focus on kids and the- orems (even if I was working for less sal- ary). But the fact is that this career is de- manding, and so are children.We bought services—child care, house cleaning—to make our lives easier and to have time for the important things. But when I hear the word “balance,” I cringe, because to me that implies you can do it all perfectly all the time. I don’t think people can, and I think the idea that they should can be debilitating. Getting it right most of the time—and getting it right for the impor- tant things—should be good enough. 5. What advice would you give to women in high tech who want to ad- vance on the management track spe- cifically?
Find good managers to emulate. Talk
with them; ask them why they make de- cisions they do, what their rationale was. Listen, listen carefully. Active listen-
ing is an underrated skill and a really im- portant one; good managers pick up lots when they talk with people: they learn what’s happening, what’s not happening, who needs what push when. They hear things that people who just want to talk never pick up. So becoming an active lis- tener is important.
Surround yourself with good people. including
You can learn a lot from bad managers and poorly managed institutions, but it’s so much more fun—and so much health- ier—to do so from good managers and well-managed institutions. Broaden yourself. Learn about other aspects of business (or academia, if you want to move into an administrative role
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