Video Interviews and Website.

The first aim of this project to create a series of video interviews with multiple distinguished female faculty in the STEM areas. Our video interviews of these women will expose female undergraduate STEM students to role models and help undergraduates realize that a career in academic research is a possibility.  We also hope that allowing students to be ‘introduced’ to several different female faculty in a less intimidating way will allow for undergraduate students to be more comfortable approaching these professors for career guidance.

The video interview portion of our project will be implemented by making use of the resources and personnel of the Rice Media Center to film and edit interviews with selected female tenure-track faculty in the Schools of Engineering and Natural Sciences.  We will approach faculty members personally about their willingness to be part of our project.  Prior to the interview, we will provide interviewees with a list of questions to which we would be interested in hearing their responses.  These questions will primarily concern research career decisions relevant to undergraduate and graduate students.  Some examples would be:  When did you decide that you wanted to pursue a career in academic research?  What is something that you have sacrificed to achieve your career goals?  Have you had to make choices concerning job location that were at odds with other priorities in your life?  Did you do research as an undergraduate?  If so, what was your experience like? (See supporting materials for a more comprehensive list of potential questions.)

Once we have produced our videos the next stage in the implementation will be to create a webpage linked through the Rice University domain where they can be housed.  It will be very important to link this webpage to other pages where undergraduate and graduate students looking for information about research and careers in research would look.  The most important places for our links will be the School of Natural Sciences and School of Engineering websites and the websites of the departments in these schools.  We would also like to have a link to our webpage from the Office of Fellowships and Undergraduate Research website.  We will also publicize our webpage to the undergraduate research coordinators specific to the different departments.

This portion of our project is contingent on the fact that faculty members are willing to share personal aspects of their lives on film to be made public.  If we field concerns on this issue, we may adjust the questions that we ask so that professors can have more flexibility in how they respond.  Also, we are not looking to interview every tenure track female professor, so we can still move forward if we find that a few professors are not interested in participating.  Other issues that we could face would involve being able to create a webpage under the Rice University domain and the relevant departments and school not being interested or willing to include links to our site on their pages.  Based on information from the ADVANCE office and conversation with faculty women, we believe that this barrier will not materialize for this project.