seltzer@ernie.Berkeley.EDU (Linda Seltzer) (02/22/89)
To the person conducting a survey about mentoring? Before I changed my field to music, I worked at Bell Labs as an MTS, including working in acoustics research. During my undergraduate years and my studies for the M.S. I had no real mentor. A few people encouraged me, but most of the professors were too busy with their own research to spend time providing students with mentoring and guidance. As for parents - they thwarted me at every turn when I was growing up - definitely no encouragement there. There were no computers in high schools when I was young. Even in college all we had was Fortran on data cards. I really didn't get involved in computers until I was studying for my M.S. in EE, and I didn't get really good training until I took in-house courses at Bell Labs. The in-house courses there made it possible for people without a lot of previous training to become productive in software.