Oral-History:Maxine Cohen
About Maxine Cohen
Dr. Maxine S. Cohen, IEEE Senior Member and IEEE Life Member, was born in Manhattan (1948) and grew up in Plainview, a suburb on Long Island. She earned a B.A. in mathematics at the University of Vermont,1970; and an M.S. and Ph.D. in Advanced Technology and Computer Science at Binghamton University, in 1982 and 1991, respectively. She in an active IEEE volunteer, especially with the IEEE Life Members Committee and the IEEE History Committee. She is also a member of ACM and UPE. Incidentally, her father was an engineer an IRE member.
After receiving her undergraduate degree in mathematics, Cohen worked in the engineering department at New England Telephone in Vermont, as a Programmer/Analyst for Eastman Kodak, and as a community college professor. Realizing the need to further her education, she enrolled in graduate school at Binghamton University. Cohen taught at the Watson School of Engineering at Binghamton University and served as director of the undergraduate computer science program for two years. Then she took a job in industry at the at IBM Corporation (Endicott, NY and Boca Raton, FL) performing human factors work.
In 1996, Cohen returned to teaching at Nova Southern University in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. For more than twenty years, she served on the faculty of the College of Engineering and Computing, teaching graduate courses (on campus and online) in Human-Computer Interaction, Interaction Design, and Social Media and advises doctoral students. In January 2017, Cohen retired from full-time work and was awarded the title Professor Emerita, but she continued working until 2019, when her last Ph.D. student completed their studies.
Cohen’s primary teaching focus has been Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), but she has taught other graduate courses. Cohen views HCI broadly, and her doctoral students have worked on various HCI-related issues, including website design, medical devices and telemedicine, virtual worlds, technology and seniors, privacy enhancing technologies and privacy policy legislation, gender issues, security issues, and trust in e-commerce applications.
Since retirement, Cohen has been actively involved in many volunteer efforts. Cohen was trained by ABET in 2018 and has served as a Program Evaluator (PEV) – Computer Science every year since. Her IEEE efforts primarily relate to the IEEE Life Member’s Committee (LMC). Still, she has served for the last two years as a member of the IEEE Awards Board—Presentation and Publicity, elected to the SSIT Board in 2022, and in 2023 asked to be a member of the MGA Member Benefits Portfolio Advisory Committee (MBPAC).
About the Interview
MAXINE COHEN: An interview Conducted by Mary Ann Hellrigel, IEEE History Center, 28 September 2021.
Interview #863 for the IEEE History Center, The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc.
Copyright Statement
This manuscript is being made available for research purposes only. All literary rights in the manuscript, including the right to publish, are reserved to the IEEE History Center. No part of the manuscript may be quoted for publication without the written permission of the Director of IEEE History Center.
Request for permission to quote for publication should be addressed to Oral History Program, IEEE History, 445 Hoes Lane, Piscataway, NJ 08854 USA or ieee-history@ieee.org. It should include identification of the specific passages to be quoted, anticipated use of the passages, and identification of the user.
It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows:
Maxine Cohen an oral history conducted in 2021 by Mary Ann Hellrigel, IEEE History Center, Piscataway, NJ USA.
Interview
INTERVIEWEE: Maxine S. Cohen
INTERVIEWER: Mary Ann Hellrigel
DATE: 28 September 2021
PLACE: Virtual [WebEx]
Hellrigel:
This is Mary Ann Hellrigel. I am the archivist and institutional historian with the IEEE History Center. I also manage their oral history program. I am at home in Woodland Park, New Jersey, and I am speaking with Dr. Maxine S. Cohen, who is at her home in Florida. Today, is September 28th, 2021. I am here to record her oral history, her life story. I thank you for taking the time. We usually do is start with your early life. And if you do not mind sharing the year you were born.
Cohen:
Sure. I was born in 1948, so I am part of the baby boomers.
Hellrigel:
You’re an early baby boomer. Where were you born?
Cohen:
I was born in New York City. My parents lived in the Bronx at the time, but I was born in Manhattan.
Hellrigel:
You grew up in the Bronx.
Cohen:
No. My parents lived in the Bronx for a little bit, then Queens, and then did the typical move at the time to suburbia. They moved to suburbia when I was in first grade.
Hellrigel:
You grew up on Long Island?
Cohen:
On Long Island, in Plainview.
Hellrigel:
It was like a Levittown.
Cohen:
Yes, it was like a Levittown. Levittown was just a few towns over. Yes, definitely; where I lived were potato farms and then all that development happened. I was in first grade, well 1954, 1955 in that timeframe. I am the oldest of four children although sometimes I say three and one, even though I know that that does add up to four, because my one sister is thirteen years younger than I am, so there is a big gap there.
Hellrigel:
Do you have other sisters, brothers?
Cohen:
Yes, I have two sisters and one brother.
Hellrigel:
Well, that is a pattern that is quite common for the baby boom.
Cohen:
Right.
Hellrigel:
A few close together and then a break.
Cohen:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
If you wouldn’t mind telling me a bit about your mother and father.
Cohen:
Sure. When I was growing up, my mother was a stay-at-home mom. She was an interesting woman. She was very opinionated. My mother was brought up as an only child, but her mother died when she was eleven. She was really a very independent kind of kid growing up, because she got teased in school about not having a mother, and stuff like that. She was brought up by her father, who was a very caring man. My father was an engineer, but I am going to say an engineer more by training. He never officially finished college. But at that point, you could become an engineer just with work experience. The part that is kind of interesting is that I grew up with the Proceedings of the IRE, the precursor to IEEE, was in my house because he was a member of the IRE. The final part of his career, he was a quality control engineer. I do remember as a child, he went back to school at one point, he went to Hofstra. There were three kids at that point in the family and he was working, so he never finished. I remember going with him to the Hofstra bookstore and him buying his books. I still have some of his old electrical engineering books. At the end, he did quality control engineering, but I’d say he was closer, in his early career, to electrical engineering. He worked at Sperry Gyroscope Company, and he worked at Simmons Precision in Vermont. I am trying to think of some of the other stuff that he did. Matter of fact, he did a lot of work that was secret clearance or classified, so we couldn’t know exactly what he did. And of course, at that point you never went into your father’s office at work. The only thing I do remember he would bring us home colored pencils. He had colored pencils from work, so he’d bring us home colored pencils.
Several years later, he worked in Vergennes, Vermont and we lived in Burlington. We went to a place just south of Vergennes. We decided we’d stop by on the way home and meet him for lunch. So, my sister and I went up to his workplace building. This was probably, I’d say, like 1968, 1969, in that timeframe. There was nobody there, so we kind of wandered our way inside. We got to my father’s desk. I do not even know how we found it, but we got to his desk. He looked up and he said, “How did you guys get in?” We said, “We just walked in.” He brought us to security because it was a secure facility, and we weren’t supposed to come in. I do remember him like looking at us, like why are you here and how did you get here? and then hauling us off to security to identify who we were. At Simmons he worked on the fuel gauges for the early space shuttles.
I always had a lot of technology in our life. One of the things that my parents did that was interesting, especially during that timeframe. We always knew my mother couldn’t do math, but it was never girls can’t do math. It was my mother couldn’t do math and I ended up being a math major. Math was really kind of in my DNA, I guess you could say. But I thought it was interesting because during that time, there just would have been a lot of comments that girls just do not do math, end of discussion.
Hellrigel:
Exactly. If you do not mind, what was your mother’s name?
Cohen:
No, my mother’s name was Esther.
Hellrigel:
Okay, and your dad?
Cohen:
My father’s name was David.
Hellrigel:
You said they grew up in the Bronx.
Cohen:
We kind of joke that my parents were what we call a mixed marriage because my father was from the Bronx and my mother was from Brooklyn. That was like two different worlds.
Hellrigel:
Did she graduate high school?
Cohen:
My mother did graduate high school. Both my parents obviously graduated high school. Yes, my mother graduated high school. My father graduated high school technically after I was born. New York City used to have an accelerated program. He was pretty bright and was in the accelerated program. When he was probably a junior in high school, he dropped out, and he decided he wanted to work in a gas station. A while after he dropped out of school, he ended up going into the navy. He was in the navy for six years. When he came out of the navy after he got discharged, he went back to his high school, and they awarded him credit for his navy time to complete his high school graduation requirements. So, his high school diploma technically is dated after I was born.
Hellrigel:
He went to college a little bit before. Which college did he go to?
Cohen:
Yes, he went to Hofstra because we were living on Long Island. I want to say he was studying engineering. I want to say it was electrical, but I am not sure if that is correct.
Hellrigel:
When your folks got married, he was in the navy?
Cohen:
Yes, when my parents got married, he was in the navy.
Hellrigel:
Hofstra, so that may have been the GI Bill.
Cohen:
It probably was GI Bill.
Hellrigel:
He was a World War II vet?
Cohen:
Yes. In the navy, he was on a ship called the Wichita.
Hellrigel:
On the ship, I guess he had a technical job?
Cohen:
Yes, he became a chief petty officer. I do not know enough about the navy levels. He didn’t go in as that. He must have gone in at a lower rank. Then he worked his way up to chief petty officer. I think he did something with some sort of radar or fire control systems. I bet somewhere I might even have an old resume of his that I could dig out.
Hellrigel:
Your father and mother both graduated high school. I wouldn’t want to use the word “accomplishment,” but, especially for your mother, that was an investment by the family.
Cohen:
Right. They were first-generation Americans. Their parents were born overseas.
Hellrigel:
They came from Eastern Europe?
Cohen:
Yes. My father’s family came from Russia and my mother’s family was more like the Poland area, so the typical Eastern European Jewish heritage.
Hellrigel:
Diaspora, yes.
Cohen:
Right, immigration. My father’s father came in through Canada and everybody else came in through the United States.
Hellrigel:
Your dad, to go to work at a gas station and then to the navy, I guess he wanted to do something maybe a little different.
Cohen:
Yes. I do not think he had an unhappy home life, but I think his parents struggled. I think especially when he did the gas station and he was into cars and doing whatever he was doing, he wanted more for himself. It was also during wartime. It was a very honorable thing, at that point, to go into the navy. He went into the navy and then sort of found himself and grew up.
Hellrigel:
Right. If he volunteered, as opposed to enlisted, maybe he could pick his branch a bit more.
Cohen:
Right, yes. I have no idea why he chose the navy.
Hellrigel:
Hopefully he could swim.
Cohen:
I do not know. I do remember him telling us stories that at the beginning he was pretty seasick. But then you get used to being seasick, and you go over the edge, get rid of what you ate, and you go back to the mess hall and get another serving.
Hellrigel:
Well, six years, that is quite an enlistment.
Cohen:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
He comes out of the navy, and he’s already married. Then they’ll start to have their children because you’re born in 1948.
Cohen:
Right, yes.
Hellrigel:
You are the first one.
Cohen:
Right. I was 1948. They got married in 1946. I do not know exactly when he came out of the navy. I think he technically was still in the navy when they got married, so he probably came out sometime in 1946. It’s not like my mother ever lived with him, on the base, so he must have already been out of the navy.
Hellrigel:
You’re born, and then a sister?
Cohen:
Yes, I have a sister that was born in 1951.
Hellrigel:
Then a brother?
Cohen:
And then a brother that was born in 1954.
Hellrigel:
And then a sister.
Cohen:
And then a sister that was born in 1961.
Hellrigel:
That is a good year.
Cohen:
Yes. Is that a good year?
Hellrigel:
Yes, for me. [Laughter].
Cohen:
Right. So, there’s a big birthday this year.
Hellrigel:
Oh yes, yes. Out of all the children, you were interested in math.
Cohen:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
What about your sisters?
Cohen:
My sister, who is just younger than me, not that she was bad in math, but she was less of a math person. She ended up doing some early childhood education with special needs kids and then most of her adult hood she was a stay-at-home mom.
Cohen:
My brother was interesting. My brother, when he was ready to go to college, decided to take a year off. He wasn’t ready to go to college. Sounds like it sort of runs in the family.
Hellrigel:
The gap year.
Cohen:
Right. They didn’t call it a gap year then, but I do remember my father being so concerned because I was already done with college at that time and my other sister was in college. He said, “I can’t believe my girls went to college and my son isn’t going to go to college.” There was definitely that kind of male-female kind of thing. Not that he denied my sister and I going to college, but he was very upset his son wasn’t going to go to college. My brother took a year off. He worked at various jobs. He was interested in photography. He was also pretty good in math, but he really had more of an interest in photography. He started college studying photography, and then left and switched schools. He went to Buffalo State, one of the New York State schools. My other sister went to the University of Rhode Island. When he went to Buffalo State, he switched to urban anthropology. My brother is ABD, so he didn’t finish his Ph.D. He did his masters and doctoral work at the University of Buffalo. He wasn’t a guy that was good at languages, and at that point his doctoral program had a language requirement, so he took Swahili or something crazy like that, because that was an option for him. Then he ended up going into city government. He was involved in New York State government and New York City government. He’s sort of semi-retired. He still has his hands in a few things.
Hellrigel:
Your father must have been happy at that point.
Cohen:
Yes. My father died in 2001, in January, and my brother, at that point had just gotten a great job in New York City government. My father knew he got the job, but he never saw him do the work of the job because he died early that year.
Hellrigel:
During that era, I understand that parents had expectations that their children would go to college and if the son doesn’t go to college, parents worried, what’s his living going to be?
Cohen:
Right. Exactly, that was the situation growing up. When I look back at things, I realize I grew up in an era where there were a lot of things girls didn’t do. But my parents, even though they were sort of concerned about my brother, more than they were about us, it was never like they would have denied their girls the opportunity to go to school and pursue an education.
Hellrigel:
Right, because they probably talked about all their children going to college. My parents had that expectation or aspiration for their children.
Cohen:
Right, exactly. Then my younger sister went to college. She went to the University of Rhode Island, and she’s done a lot of different things with her working life. She was some a scientist for a while, at the Rockefeller Institute in New York, and she later became a stockbroker. Then she was an art dealer. Now she’s an HR professional so she did lots of different things over the course of her career.
Hellrigel:
Those are tremendous career shifts.
[Laughter]
Cohen:
Some of it was because she was married and her husband was moving, so she did have to do some reinventing herself because of those moves.
Hellrigel:
I guess you were growing up and you lived on Long Island, but then you moved to Vermont because your dad’s job moved.
Cohen:
Right. I moved to Vermont. Well, all of us sort of moved to Vermont. When we were moving to Vermont, I was in an excellent suburban school district in New York and I remember my father even going to meet with the guidance counselor at school, which typically the fathers didn’t do at that time. They didn’t take off from work, but my father used to go. I do remember I was one of the few kids in my schools who didn’t have study hall because my father said, “I am not sending her to school to have study hall.” I had four years of French and three years of German because I couldn’t have study hall. All my friends had study hall, but I didn’t.
When we moved to Vermont my father talked to the people in the new school district and because New York was ahead of Vermont in the courses I had taken, I would not have had any math or any science, so I would have had only three classes and five study halls. He said, “You’re not going to do that,” so I stayed in New York. My parents moved to Vermont my senior year in high school. I stayed in New York part of the year with one girlfriend’s family and part of the year with another girlfriend’s family and I finished high school in Plainview.
I look back at that. I was a good kid. It was a different time. But now that I am a parent myself, that was a big responsibility to give another parent. And remember, we didn’t have ATMs. We didn’t have cell phones. I spoke to my parents once a week, on Sunday morning because that is when long distance stuff was cheaper. I didn’t talk to them during the week. The other parents signed a release in case there were any medical issues or anything like that. My parents sent them money. They’d send them a check. They’d deposit it. I couldn’t go to the ATM machine and take out cash. Things were very different. I am still close with the two friends that I lived with, and it has obviously been a lot of years now. I graduated high school. My parents came up for graduation, put me in the car, and we were off to Vermont.
Hellrigel:
When you’re younger you’re studying math, science, and languages, so at that point, you’re taking all the college prep courses.
Cohen:
Yes. Oh, go ahead.
Hellrigel:
It was already determined. They do not know which college you’re going to, but you’re going to one of them.
Cohen:
Right, yes. I’d say 90 percent of my friends that I knew in Plainview were going to college. Even if the parents were not college educated, that was typically what they wanted for their children. It was interesting because the college application process was so different than it is now. I applied to three colleges, the University of Vermont, SUNY Albany, and Jackson, which was the women’s college of Tufts, because at that point there was a separate women’s college.
My father took me to Jackson. It was outside of Boston. I got out of the car. I took one look around and I said, “I do not like how these people look. This is not for me.” My father said, “We’re here. You’re going to do the interview.” So, we did the interview. That was sort of my reach school. I would have needed a scholarship to go there. Then basically my choices were Albany and the University of Vermont. I got into all three schools.
I remember my father called me one Sunday morning. He said, “I spoke to financial aid in New York at Albany, and I spoke to financial aid in Vermont, and you’re going to lose your New York residency.” My parents technically were Vermont residents, but they hadn’t been in Vermont a full year yet. But Vermont said that they would give me residency. I remember he called up and said, “You’re going to the University of Vermont.” End of discussion.
Hellrigel:
The reality of economics.
Cohen:
Right. I went to Vermont. I got a scholarship. I had Vermont in-state resident tuition. My father did give me $1,000 my first year of school. There were four kids in the family, you know, so that was a lot and all they could afford. I worked during the school year. I worked summers.
Hellrigel:
What did you do for summer jobs? During high school did you have one?
Cohen:
I didn’t really start working until we moved to Vermont. In Vermont, I worked the first year I was there. I worked at the A&W Root Beer restaurant. We could have anything on the menu except the pepper steak, which was probably $3.99. We weren’t allowed to eat that, but we could have hamburgers.
Hellrigel:
All the floats you wanted, too?
Cohen:
I know, all the floats we wanted. We were not on roller skates. It was like more counter service. The restaurant was downtown. Later, in college, I worked in a biochemistry labs. I had a lot of work study type assignments. I worked in the student activity center.
Hellrigel:
You cobbled it all together and you graduated.
Cohen:
Yes, right. I graduated with a BA in math not a BS in math. I didn’t have AP credit. There wasn’t as much of that like there is now. I took my courses. I think one summer I went to summer school. When I went and met with my math advisor, I remember going to him. I said, “I think I have enough to graduate in December with a BA degree, and he said, “Well, you have to come back in the spring and take a math course.” The rule was once you were a junior, you had to have a math course every term. I said, “But you do not understand. I have enough credits for the BA. I do not have to come back. I am done.” I do remember, he kind of looked at me a little puzzled, did a little investigation, found out, yes, that was true, so I graduated with a BA in math. I graduated in December, but most people graduated in May or June.
Hellrigel:
Right. You got out a semester early.
Cohen:
I got out a semester early. My husband and I got married the summer of 1969. Part of why we got married is my father had another job opportunity back in New York. I was going to lose my Vermont residency and my scholarship. I really would have been up the creek and I would have had a hard time finishing college. My husband was a Vermonter. We were dating most of college. We decided to move things up and got married summer of 1969. I had one more semester of college and he still had one more year in school. He was in mechanical engineering. After I completed my courses, I worked for what, at that point, was New England Telephone. I was considered a college graduate. I didn’t make a huge amount of money, but I made enough for us to live on until he graduated.
Hellrigel:
What did you do for the telephone company?
Cohen:
I was in the engineering department. I do not remember what my title was anymore, but I remember what I did. We had these plans or engineering drawings that showed the location of the various electrical poles and the wires. They were moving some of the wires underground. When they moved the wires underground, they would remove the poles. Each pole had an identifier with a pole number and the age of the pole. We had to depreciate and calculate what the lumber and the wire was worth. We had a chart that we used to look up the information. I am not even sure what I would call it
Hellrigel:
You were doing some accounting work. You’re doing a cost-base depreciation.
Cohen:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
They can deduct that from their accounts.
Cohen:
Right. It was all manual. You’d count literally, one, two, three. You’d count. You’d look at the big plans and you’d count the number of poles. Each pole had a year when it was put up and the lumber had different depreciation rates. It was all done by hand. I do not even think there were calculators around.
Hellrigel:
You probably didn’t need one, really.
Cohen:
Yes. It was arithmetic. It wasn’t fancy science. It was just arithmetic.
Hellrigel:
Were there other women doing this work with you, or were there guys?
Cohen:
Yes, there was a mix. There were women and there were men.
Hellrigel:
Your math degree got you this job?
Cohen:
Yes, probably my math degree got me the job. It’s funny because I do write on all of my forms that degrees were only granted once a year, so I graduated in 1970, but I attended college only until December 1969. Now obviously I do not fill out job applications, but I always used to fill them out very carefully.
Hellrigel:
You never know about reviewing the specifics.
Cohen:
I know. Right, I just always want to make sure, if it says attended, then I attended only until December 1969.
Hellrigel:
Right. I guess you were working in Burlington?
Cohen:
I was in Burlington, yes.
Hellrigel:
And your husband?
Cohen:
My husband was in school. I did college kind of three and a half years. He was an engineer and did the five-year plan. He is sort of a year older than me, but he took an extra year.
Hellrigel:
This is, I want to say, Arnold?
Cohen:
Arnold, right.
Hellrigel:
He’s a Vermont boy.
Cohen:
He’s a Vermont boy.
Hellrigel:
He graduates with his BSME.
Cohen:
Yes. BSME, exactly.
Hellrigel:
At this point, you’re married. Historically, 1969 was a challenging year in the U.S.
Cohen:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
Were there other young women in your class getting married?
Cohen:
It’s interesting, going back, when I first started college, to be honest, I wanted to be an engineer and I thought about electrical engineering. I was much quieter and more reserved than I am now. My father was very worried that I would get eaten up because there weren’t very many girls and women in engineering. As a matter of fact, because I knew Arnie, and he was an engineer, I was aware there were three women engineers in the program. One dropped out, so she never made it through the program. The other two did finish. It was definitely a very male world. I am glad I was a math major because math was a little bit more equal and equitable.
Hellrigel:
Right. You would have gotten people going into teaching and such in terms of careers.
Cohen:
Right.
Hellrigel:
From a younger age, you wanted to be an engineer?
Cohen:
Yes. When I started college, I wanted to do French, French secondary education. Then I realized I’d never have the opportunity to go to France because I was a kid going through school on scholarship. I also always had interest in math. I was a mathlete in high school and took all the math courses I could, so then my sort of second choice was math. It was pretty amazing because I switched majors from French secondary education to math. I still finished in three and a half years, even though I ended up with a BA degree, and I got married during that time. Things were not automated. I always was worried that I’d have the pieces, but nobody would glue the whole thing together because my name changed and everything. But it all did work.
Hellrigel:
Did your dad worry you’d get married and not finish college?
Cohen:
No, I do not think my parents ever worried about that because even though I met Arnie, he was college bound. I was college bound. I do not remember them ever being concerned that we wouldn’t finish.
Hellrigel:
You’re working for the telephone company, and then Arnie is going to graduate.
Cohen:
He graduated in 1970. He would have graduated in 1969, but he graduated in 1970.
Hellrigel:
Then what happened?
Cohen:
Then he was looking for a job. We decided we would sort of see where he could get a job. Vermont had a really good career development center and companies used to come to meet potential graduates and have them apply for positions and do initial interviews even on campus. He ended up interviewing at Xerox in Rochester, New York. At that point, we made the decision we would go where he got a job and then once we knew where we were going, I would find a job. We moved to Rochester, New York right after graduation, so probably the summer of 1970. Then I got a job shortly thereafter. I do not know exactly when I started at Eastman Kodak, but it was definitely in 1970.
Hellrigel:
Right. Your vitae states August 1970.
Cohen:
Okay. Thank you. All right. I should have pulled my vitae out, but yes, I knew it was in the summer. Interestingly, Kodak took math majors and music majors and they put us through a training program to learn programming.
I think there were three computer science degrees in the country, at that point, probably like Stanford, MIT, a handful of places. I did take some programming courses in college. I learned PL/I and I learned FORTRAN 4, so that sort of dates me a little bit. I never learned COBOL. I had the opportunity to learn COBOL. Somebody once told me, “As a woman, do not take COBOL, or you’ll be stuck doing COBOL programming all your life.” I kind of went the FORTRAN, PL/I routes. I knew of PL/I, but when I went to Kodak, they had an IBM shop. It was an IBM 360. Just looking to see if I have it here. I used to have in my drawer that old green card that they used to give you that had all the codes.
Hellrigel:
All the codes, yes.
Cohen:
Yes, I know. I was trying to see if I have it in my desk drawer. I do not know where I have it. But anyway, so I went through a training program at Kodak. We learned PL/I. We also learned assembler language. We were in a cohort type class. They took the new graduates, and we all went through the training program together and then they assigned us to various different areas in the company. I ended up at an accounts receivable department. To be honest, I never really used more math than division, so the math that we did was pretty straightforward. I do remember, we were writing programs and talking about dates. We used 70 for 1970, 71 for 1971, 72 for 1972, and so on. The computers were limited in memory capacity, and we only used two digits per year. We all used to joke, we used to say, “Oh, these programs are not going to be around in thirty years, when we hit the year 2000.” It was a deliberate thing and intentional decision. Memory on the computer was critical and limited. There just wasn’t that much memory on the computers. Matter of fact, the big accounts receivable jobs, they used to run them third shift. And when they ran them third shift, it was using tapes. The records were split into three tapes, so if they had to stop the process because of a problem, they would only have to stop it, and restart again hopefully not needing all three tapes. Maybe it’s only tape two or three, and they could continue and have everything up and running for the morning when everybody came back in and the systems all went back online.
I was learning what I call structured programming, but using things like go-to statements, and writing what they called spaghetti code. We didn’t have the formal structure of while loops which got introduced into PL/I until 1971, or 1972. So, of course, you did everything with go-tos. You did subroutines because they had to be small enough pieces of code to be able to swap in and out of memory when they were doing the processing.
Hellrigel:
At this point you’re running accounts for the customers that are buying your equipment?
Cohen:
Right. We were in Rochester, New York. For a while they had an old building, building 205, but then I moved to downtown. Rochester was very much a Kodak town. Rochester was kind of a two-company town at that point. There was Kodak and there was Xerox. My husband was at Xerox. We kind of had the two big industries covered.
Hellrigel:
Yes. A little bit before that, maybe you would have been at Gleason Tools.
Cohen:
Maybe. Or I could have been at French’s Mustard or Bausch & Lomb. There were a few other employers in Rochester, but Eastman Kodak and Xerox were really the two big employers.
We had a group of friends that all started about the same time. We all bought our first houses about the same time. I was the first one of my friends to get pregnant. I had my son in 1973.
When I had Jason, one of the things they asked me was to continue to work, but part time and off hours. We didn’t even have a term for this. At that point, I was really a contract employer, but we didn’t even know the word “contract employer” at the time. My husband carried the benefits. I was just really paid hourly. We used to run the computers three shifts a day, so I would often come in second shift. My husband would come home from work, we would have dinner and then I’d leave him with the baby. Everything was on punched cards. I’d get my card deck ready and sometimes I would take Jason in with me during the day. He’d sit on the floor next to the keypunch machine. I’d key punch my deck, put one run in before I went, went home, had dinner, left Arnie home with Jason. Then I went back, and second shift I could get a lot more runs in compared to during the day. It was actually pretty efficient. I would come home about 10:00, 11:00 at night and when Jason took a nap the next day I just would take a nap, too.
Hellrigel:
Were there other women doing that too?
Cohen:
There were just a handful. There were just maybe two or three of us. When I was doing that, I could kind of name my hours. Then they put me in a different division, and they wanted me physically in the office regular hours, two days a week, so I transitioned to that schedule. It’s not so much that that job was ending, but my husband was looking for a job because Xerox was going through some cutbacks. He was looking for a job and I was pregnant with my daughter. In 1976, we left Rochester, and my daughter was born in 1976. We moved to Evansville, Indiana and my husband worked for Mead-Johnson, which was a division of Bristol-Myers. I started thinking I wanted to do some sort of work, but I had two little kids, so I just stayed home and that was fine. As a matter of fact, Evansville, Indiana was definitely a cross between the South and the Midwest. I had grown up in the Northeast, so it was a little bit of culture shock to me. I do remember it was the height of the ERA.
Hellrigel:
Right, the Equal Rights Amendment.
Cohen:
I will say this, I do remember all these women that I met would talk about they do not want their daughters to go into the army because what happens if they are in a foxhole with a man and they get their period? I am like what happens if you are in a foxhole, and you get shot? Priorities were very different. I remember I got a group of kids together in the neighborhood and we went off to the library. There were a couple of things that were sort of odd to me. We went to the library and the librarian asked me what name I’d like on my library card. I am sort of like, an alias? What do you mean, what name do I want on my library card? He said, “Well do you want Mrs. Arnold Cohen on your library card?” I said, “No. If my husband wants a library card, he can come get it himself. No, I want Maxine Cohen.” Then I do remember, we got a group of kids together. Some of my neighbors had said, “Well the books in the library were old.” I said these are kids. It doesn’t matter what book they’re reading if it’s old. It’s not like they’re reading only bestsellers. They’re kids. We got a whole group together. I was just surprised. They had a story hour, but they had no kids. We probably got eight to ten kids that started coming to the story hour. Then the kids had activities and stuff, and fun. It was a little shocking to me with some of that. We lived there about eighteen months. My husband’s job was not quite what he thought it was going to be and we really missed our families because our families were all back east, and we had two young kids. So, we moved. That is when we moved to Binghamton. We moved to Binghamton in—I have to think. If Rochelle was born in 1976, we moved to Binghamton in 1978.
Hellrigel:
Which job will your husband take now?
Cohen:
My husband then worked for IBM.
Hellrigel:
Wow. And that is your next link, too.
Cohen:
Right. Am I making this too long?
Hellrigel:
No. Often people do not fill this in when they tell their story, but this is the reality. You’ve got a technical job for a technical education, and then the reality of family, and you’re blending it. Your husband is making this happen, too, because he helped with Jason and didn’t say “Bugger off. I want my meal at 5:00 p.m. and my cocktail at 7:00 p.m.” This is an example of how things work. Evansville, even though I think that is a university town--
Cohen:
Yes, there is the University of Evansville.
Hellrigel:
It’s still the Midwest and very different from where you grew up and previously lived.
Cohen:
Right. We were in a suburb called Newburgh, Indiana. And matter of fact, we were there the worst winters they ever had. They only had one plow for the entire county, so to be honest, school was closed for three weeks because they couldn’t plow the streets. My kids were little, so my kids weren’t in school. Matter of fact, during that time, that is when the University of Evansville basketball team had a horrible plane accident.
Hellrigel:
Oh yes, yes.
Cohen:
Yes. We weren’t so much in Evansville. We were more in a suburb, even though my husband worked in Evansville. It was just weird. Indiana is one of the few states that doesn’t observe daylight savings time.
Hellrigel:
Exactly, yes.
Cohen:
So sometimes we were on the same time as everyone back east. Sometimes we were an hour off. All the shows, when they used to say 8:00 p.m. eastern time, 7:00 p.m. central, they came on 7:00 p.m. Everything was just a little different.
Hellrigel:
Right, and culturally, it was different, too.
Cohen:
Culturally, it was different. To be honest, in Evansville there was still some Klan activities and cross burnings in the early 1970s.
Hellrigel:
In the 1970s? And yes, it is different.
Cohen:
Yes. Matter of fact, I remember too that in the main hotel downtown they had a fancy restaurant, and they didn’t allow black people in the restaurant until like 1973.
Hellrigel:
People do not realize that segregation continued to happen in the North, and it might not have happened by Jim Crow Laws, but it happened by habit.
Cohen:
Right.
Hellrigel:
Even though the laws change, some people did what they wanted.
Cohen:
Right, yes. There was a little bit of that, and it was kind of culture shock to me, growing up in the New York, and even Vermont. When I grew up in Plainview, it was white middle class. It was Jewish. It was in its own bubble. I am not telling you it wasn’t a bubble. But we were certainly a little bit more aware. When we moved to Evansville, it was culture shock. So, back to Binghamton.
Hellrigel:
Right. At this point, are you taking your family vacations and driving east to see family?
Cohen:
Yes, we would go east. I used to sometimes fly by myself with the kids. There was one flight on what used to be Allegheny Airlines. It used to go from Evansville, to Indianapolis, to Akron/Canton, then to New York, but it was the same plane. I would take the kids on the plane because it was easy. We didn’t have to switch. But I do remember with my son, they used to give him apple juice at every leg, so then of course he would have to go to the bathroom. I do remember putting my daughter in the sink in the airplane bathroom because I couldn’t put her on the bathroom floor. It was filthy. You wouldn’t ask a stranger, “Hey, could you hold my kid while I take somebody to the bathroom?” When my husband worked for Mead-Johnson, he went to a plant in Zeeland, Michigan. We did go to the Henry Ford manufacturing factory, and we did go to Detroit. We did some traveling, and some family vacation trips, seeing a little bit of that part of the country.
Hellrigel:
You’re back in New York state. You’re in Binghamton in 1978.
Cohen:
Right, we’re back in New York state and Binghamton. When we went to Binghamton my husband started working for IBM. We moved to Binghamton in the spring of 1978.
My son was starting kindergarten, and I was starting to get a little, I am going to use the word “nudgy” because I do not know what a good English word to use. I kind of wanted to go back to work, but I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do. I had two little kids, so I was debating. I did see an advertisement for a job at Broome Community College, which was the community college that was teaching BASIC and RPG. I actually knew RPG from my Kodak days. I did PL/I, but I also had done some RPG programming.
I applied for the job. I didn’t hear back, so right before the school term started, I remember I called up the gentleman who I applied to, and I said, “You know, I applied for this job. I never even got rejected.” I am still interested. The guy hired me on the spot, on the phone. I was okay, but I had to run around and secure childcare arrangements. It was part-time, but that was fine. When I went to meet with him and talk to him, I found out what had happened was that he had hired another person for the job, and last-minute, the other person decided not to take the job. He had thrown out all the resumes since he figured he had a sure thing, so when I called and I sounded semi-coherent on the phone, he figured, I am going to grab her. She’s better than nothing. But I do remember him walking me in the hall to class. I had never taught before. I knew the material, but I just had never taught. I must have had some hesitation and it must have been apparent. He said, “Just remember. You know more than they do.” I said thank you, and I started teaching. To be honest, I really liked it.
That is really how I got into teaching. I do not know if you want to call it serendipitous or an odd thing. It’s not that I had been trained as an educator even though at one point I did want to go in education. I started teaching part-time. Then as I got a little further along and I went to full time. Then I kind of saw the handwriting on the wall if I did not get my master’s degree because I only had an undergraduate at that point. I’d need to get a master’s degree. I went back to SUNY Binghamton, which now is known as Binghamton University, and did my master’s. I think I got my master’s in 1982. I think you probably have that on my vitae.
Hellrigel:
Yes, August of 1982.
Cohen:
Yes. At that point, Binghamton did not have an MSCS as a Master of Science in computer science degree. They only had master’s degrees and Ph.Ds. in advanced technology, with a specialization in computer science or systems science. That was the way the degree was worded. I earned my computer science degree. Then what I saw was happening was that my time as a student was peaking at the same time as my time as faculty and I was trying to juggle family life as well. I went to Binghamton University and worked in the academic computer center where we did consulting for students and faculty.
I remember there was a really interesting faculty person in the music department. His name was Harry Lincoln. He has since passed away. But he was one of the early pioneers using computers with music. If you look up Harry Lincoln Music, and you look him up, I am sure he even has a Wikipedia page. He was trying to automate the process of writing music with computers. It’s now stuff that we take for granted, but at that point, he was really ahead of his time.
Then Binghamton asked me to come teach as a one-year faculty member. I did that one year for eleven years. During that time, I also decided I had to go back and get my Ph.D., so I got my Ph.D. My son graduated high school the same year I got my Ph.D.
I went back to school later in life. I do have to commend my husband. He was really good because we went down a few, what I call uncharted paths. I was busy working. My daughter used to be very funny. We both were working, but if the kids got sick at school, my daughter would always say to the nurse, “Please, please call my daddy. He will drop everything he’s doing and come get me. My mom maybe will come the same day, but she’ll finish what she’s doing first.” As if I wouldn’t come. Of course, I would go. But it was just funny her perception of things. One time, she was going out with some friends, and they said, “Do you have a mother?” She said, “Yes,” but I was typically working, and my husband had a more flexible afternoon schedule and he drove the kids to activities.
Since my husband had a more conventional kind of job at IBM, he started early. I tried to never have a class starting before 9:00 a.m., so that I could get the kids on the bus in the morning and get them off to school. The kids were latchkey kids. They came home 3:00 ’ish. He is an early bird, so he asked if he could go in a little earlier. He usually came home between 3:30 p.m. and 4:00 p.m., so he came home and kind of got dinner. If I had a 9:00 a.m. class, I also may have had a 4:30 p.m. class. I had some flexibility in my schedule, but it took both of us to make things work. One of the times it was sort of funny. When I went back to school for my Ph.D. I told my husband “Something has to give, if we’re going to do this together.” He took up most of the grocery shopping and the cooking. One of the times he went out of town to a family funeral, and I didn’t go and the kids didn’t go. The kids sat down, and they said, “How are we going to eat without Daddy here?” I said, “I am capable of cooking. I could even take you to McDonald’s.” My kids, to this day, only remember me cooking the Jewish holidays and holiday meals. My kids do not remember me doing day-to-day meals.
Hellrigel:
The day to day.
Cohen:
It’s very funny. Even to this day, we still have that discussion.
Hellrigel:
Did the children learn to cook?
Cohen:
We tried an experiment with once a week they were going to cook. My son gave us bagels. That was what we all got from him. My daughter was a little bit better, but it didn’t work.
Hellrigel:
Sorry to interrupt you, but I thought maybe--
Cohen:
No, that is all right. That was a good question. No, because I do remember, we said once a week. We figured if each kid took a day that would break things up. We did eat out. We eat out a lot more now, especially post-COVID. Now every place does takeout.
Hellrigel:
Yes, exactly.
Cohen:
There wasn’t as many takeout opportunities and those kinds of things to do. But like I said I had one semester off.
Hellrigel:
Well, you were busy, going to graduate school at the same time you’re teaching full time.
Cohen:
Right. They gave me one semester off. They gave me what they call research leave, so I had one semester free from teaching responsibilities.
Hellrigel:
Raising a family, full-time graduate school, and full-time teaching, that is a lot of work.
Cohen:
Yes, I do agree. I think that there’s a couple things that my kids learned from it. I think my kids have a really good sense of lifelong learning. Learning doesn’t have to end right when you’re done with school. They saw me going back and doing that. I want to say my kids got a more egalitarian parenting system, even though when we were in the midst of it, I do not know if I would have been able to say it positively because it was hard. There was no question. One of the things that I think helped was that my husband’s job was more of a twelve-month job. We lived in a town where commuting was really easy, so that stuff wasn’t too bad. My job was more of a nine-month job. I had a lot of the vacations when the kids had vacations, so we had some parts of it that fit very nicely. My daughter liked me to read to her every night, so I’d read to her every night. I do remember I once read her my database book because that is what I needed to read. It puts you to sleep, really quickly, whether you’re reading it for pleasure or you’re reading it for school. My daughter, for a long time, when she’d sit and do her homework, she’d want me to sit at the table and do work with her because it’s not like we had to be doing the same things.
Hellrigel:
She wanted you to stay with her.
Cohen:
Right, that we’d sit together. I think for my son, being a little bit older, he got to see some really good role modeling. Yes, I could be there for the family. Yes, I am going to say we had a pretty traditional structure. But, at the same time they really got to see some things kind of on the fringes. There was a joke with my kids, when it came to Hanukkah and the holidays, I’d often give them IOUs. I used to give them stuff for all eight days, but I’d give them IOUs because we’d go shopping after we were both all done with school. Or I’d buy them stuff; the student center always had sales. My kids had I can’t tell you how many SUNY Binghamton tie dye shirts as a Hanukkah present. That was one of their presents because I could always kind of run out and get that at shows at the student union near the holiday time.
I had a few friends that were also going to school with me, but when I was finishing my Ph.D., my daughter came with me to do an errand. We had to drop off all the copies of the dissertation to be bound. When we had to do that, she said, “Mom, are all these other people getting their Ph.Ds.? I said, yes. And she said, “Oh, I didn’t know you could get your Ph.D. so young because she saw with me, I had nothing in common with a young kid that was twenty-two, twenty-three, and could sit up all night doing schoolwork. I had other obligations. I think that the kids got to see some of that. I do know my daughter went on and well ten years ago, she did her Ed.D. I think it’s because she had that kind of structure of yes, I am going to go on. She got her degree the same year her daughter was born, so she also did it a little later in life as well.
Hellrigel:
Your daughter went into education?
Cohen:
My daughter started out as an English Literature major. My daughter struggled a little bit at the beginning with college. Let me take this back a little bit. My son went off to college when we were living in Binghamton, so he went to Oneonta, which was one of the New York state schools.
Hellrigel:
Oh, yes.
Cohen:
He went to college there. He really wanted math education. He was doing some athletic coaching, and he had a professor that didn’t think people should be doing coaching since it would distract from their education, so she gave him a really hard time. He ended up switching his major to math and he graduated as a math major from Oneonta. When he graduated, his last year, we were moving to Florida.
I guess we need to sort of talk about the transition from Binghamton to Florida, but I’ll come back to that in a minute.
Then when my daughter started college, we decided we’d leave her in New York, and she went to Oneonta. Jason was there, too. She had family and friends, and she could go back to Binghamton. It was the wrong move. She really wasn’t ready to be 1,200 miles away from us and she flunked out her first term. She came home and moved in with us in Florida. She worked for a little bit and then she decided she wanted to go back to school, but we told her she couldn’t go back to school unless she was really prepared. We had her start at the community college, with a few courses and prove herself with one year at the community college. She applied to Florida State and then moved to Tallahassee and finished as an English Literature major.
All of this is sort of related to my career. When I finished, Binghamton had said if I really wanted a full-time tenure track position, I had to get a Ph.D. I went to school and got my Ph.D., but I ran into a little bit of the problem, you can’t be in the same department because they wouldn’t hire their own graduates and all that sort of stuff. I ended up doing my Ph.D. in advanced technology, but in systems science. I had a great and supportive advisor. He worked with me. What I was doing was knowledge elicitation for expert systems, so it still had a computer science twist to it.
Hellrigel:
What does that mean?
Cohen:
What does that mean? It meant we were trying to look at different people’s personalities. We were using the MBTI as a classification of personalities and trying to use the different strengths and weaknesses from that to word questions to better elicit the knowledge from an expert. So, with your oral history, I am sure as you’ve done, some people you have to ask different types of questions. Some people go on too long, like I may be, and some people give you a lot of detail, and some people only give you the big picture. Well, by understanding the person’s personality and their preferences, you are able to tailor the questions for them. Acquiring the knowledge and putting it into an AI expert system.
Hellrigel:
So, it’s some psychology, too.
Cohen:
Yes, it’s a little psychology. It’s more of a theoretical model. But it’s a theoretical model that was, yes, based in psychology, and then using the computer as a tool. To me, it was like a really good blending because I am a computer person, but I also think I am a bit of a people person too. I am not just kind of a techie. When I finished my Ph.D., there were two other gentlemen also working in my department. One went through, and also got his Ph.D., and they put him on a tenure track. The other one they decided didn’t have to get his Ph.D., but they put him on an instructor track. They decided I would probably never leave Binghamton because my husband was at IBM. So, they just wanted to keep me on one-year appointments as a lecturer.
Hellrigel:
They thought they had you.
Cohen:
They had me, right, as a lecturer. I see it more looking back, than I did at the time. I was a lecturer. I really felt like my family, we sacrificed a lot for me to do my Ph.D. My kids were growing up. I applied to IBM, and I went to work at IBM in Endicott, New York. I was hired into their human factors department, and I did HCI work for them.
Before I left Binghamton University, I had a National Science Foundation grant. I had set up a laboratory in multimedia. I developed the first HCI course that they ever had at Binghamton. Binghamton, at that point, was very software engineering focused, as many other institutions. The problem is the computer. It’s not the people. We now know, looking at it in 2021, it’s the people that is the issue, not the computers.
Hellrigel:
What did the department say, when you told them adios and you left?
Cohen:
They were shocked.
Hellrigel:
You had had it.
Cohen:
I just had it, right. I mean, I really felt like, as a family, we sacrificed a lot. Everybody kind of pulled for me to do this and it really wasn’t right.
Hellrigel:
But that was a common thing to do.
Cohen:
It was a common thing.
Hellrigel:
It was the wrong thing to do, but the common thing to do. Often, when you start part-time, they figure you’re not going anywhere, especially, if you’re the woman.
Cohen:
Right. We were in Binghamton, New York. In Binghamton, there wasn’t a real lot of other industries. Matter of fact, IBM was taking a lot of their engineers at that time, and they were retraining them as programmers because they needed programmers.
My husband was in one of those classes and he went from being a mechanical engineer into programming. It was a great opportunity for him. I think it was a year and a half or two years. They paid him his IBM salary and he went to SUNY Binghamton. He didn’t end up with another degree because he already had a bachelor’s degree, but he had the programming courses. Then IBM changed his title to a programmer. Matter of fact, we had to get special permission because at that point, I was working part-time for the IBM retraining program, and he was in my class. We had to get special permission from IBM so that he could be in my class, and it wasn’t a conflict of interest. I had enough history of having done that for a bunch of years, so yes it was fine. However, we used to often come in two cars. Sometimes somebody in the class would say, “Oh, you guys have the same last name.” And, we’d say, “Yes, coincidence, isn’t it?”
Hellrigel:
Exactly.
Cohen:
He always tells me he thinks more people knew. He was really being retrained as a programmer. He worked as a programmer. Some of my years are a little fuzzy, like how all that fit together.
Anyway, I was at IBM Endicott, and he was also at IBM. Then I got downsized from IBM. It was like November and December. I wanted to take a little extra vacation time. I was told, “Oh, you’re too critical.” March 1st of that year, they decided I was going to be excessed and downsized, but I was given the opportunity to move to IBM Boca Raton. We decided as a family that he would follow me this time. IBM Endicott put him on a leave because they said they didn’t have an opportunity for him in Boca. IBM was going through a lot of big downsizing, so this was in 1994.
Hellrigel:
They had all that competition with the clones coming on the market and all that.
Cohen:
Yes, right. When I left IBM, I wanted to buy an IBM computer with my IBM discounts, and I could only get it with Microsoft’s operating system. I couldn’t get it with OS/2, which was IBM’s operating system at the time.
We moved to Boca. My husband after a short while, reinvented himself as a software engineer, and he worked as a contract person. Some of the stuff we had to balance, as we had a family, and we needed to have medical care. But at that point, my job was full time, so I carried the medical care for us and he could work as a contractor. The kids got sort of caught in the shuffle a little bit. My son had started college up north. He had one more year to finish. We just made him a New York State resident and he finished. My daughter started in Oneonta, but she wasn’t ready to be that far away from us, so she flunked out and she came home.
We planned. The best laid plans. We had put IBM stock away that we figured would cover the kids for one year of college. The IBM stock was down the tubes at that point. We only had one year the kids overlapped. That was the year my husband wasn’t working. We’re like yes, you try to plan.
Hellrigel:
But things happen, yes.
Cohen:
Things happen. We moved to Florida. My daughter ended up coming with us. Then she went to Florida State and finally graduated. My son graduated from Oneonta. We told him he can go live anywhere in the country he wanted, but of course if he came and lived with us, he could live rent free until he figured out what he wanted to do regarding a job. He moved to Florida and got a job teaching math at a high school in Florida. In Florida, he did not need an education degree. He just needed a couple of psychology courses, so he took those courses at the local community college. He started as a long-term sub, and then he transitioned to a permanent math position. He’s been there, I do not know how many years. I think he’s teaching over twenty years now and now he does more administrative work. He was math department chair for a while. He works with the kids that are sort of in trouble and not graduating. All the stuff you see in the papers about graduation rates for high schools, he’s the one that calculates that stuff.
Hellrigel:
He’s quite established and content.
Cohen:
Yes, right.
Hellrigel:
He got to use his degree in math.
Cohen:
He got to use his degree. He does work with counseling kids. He works with parents as well. It’s funny because when he was in middle school, he gave us a run for our money for a while. Then he was calling parents to say your kid is not doing well. The Boca kids and the parents are very spoiled, so sometimes the parent would say, “Oh, you must have my kid mixed up with another kid.” I know when he called a parent, he knew very well which kid he was calling.
My daughter ended up doing I want to say marketing type work. She really liked to have variety in her job. After she graduated, she went to New York City. She always wanted to be in New York. She worked for an organization called the International Council of Shopping Centers. She did marketing pieces. She did their newsletter. She did some travel for them. She did event planning. She did a lot of different kinds of things. She then came back to Florida; she went to Orlando for a while, and she also did some more event planning. Then she ended up getting a job at Nova Southeastern University, in the Orlando campus, and then transferred here to Fort Lauderdale. She went back to school and got her master’s in educational leadership—now I am thinking what it’s called, administration of higher education. I do not know. I can look up what her degree was. She did that and then she ended up going back to school and she did her Ed.D.
Hellrigel:
At Nova.
Cohen:
At Nova, right. She got a tuition break, so it was good. Now she’s Assistant Dean of the College of Pharmacy, West Palm Beach. She’s not a pharmacist, but she brings in the educational administration stuff.
Hellrigel:
It must be nice to you that your children went into education.
Cohen:
Yes. I think it’s good. My son in law is in education as well. But now the way the teachers are taught, my granddaughter is starting to talk a little bit about education. And everyone is saying no, no, no, no. But I think she’ll end up there too.
Hellrigel:
Yes, the industry is changing. It’s changing the most, I think, at the college level.
Cohen:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
Nova has become your family’s anchor, then.
Cohen:
Right, yes. I guess we’ve been in Florida twenty-seven years now, so it's a long time. We were at Binghamton sixteen years, and we raised our family there, so we used to feel that was home, but obviously now it's Florida. When we first moved to Florida my folks were in Florida, so it was really nice. We had the time with them. They're now both gone.
I do kind of want to share a quick kind of diversion, I remember when I graduated with my Ph.D. my parents came to Binghamton for my graduation, and my son graduated high school the same year. My father sat down at the table and started reading my dissertation. I said, “Dad, that is really nice, but nobody reads a dissertation. No one's going to read it.” I think he was really proud. My parents, for certain things they were a ahead of their time. When I was working at Binghamton when I was on the eleventh year of my one-year job, I had an opportunity to go to Natick Research Labs and do some summer research as a faculty member. I remember that, and my father sat down with me, and he said, “Maxine, how are you going to do that and leave Arnie with the kids?” I said, “Dad, if Arnie had the opportunity, you would not have this conversation with me.” He looked a little sheepish, and he said, “you're right”. At that point I was a phone call away.
The following year I went to Aberdeen Proving Grounds and did some research there. I lived in what was called BOQ, which is Bachelor Officer Quarters. Later they changed the name to Unaccompanied Personnel Housing. It was funny because when my husband came to visit me, we had to go to a hotel since you were not allowed overnight guests. Sometimes he'd say, we're married, I said, “I do not want to lose my housing option.” It was interesting, and I think that is when I really got a lot more into my HCI research. Binghamton kept saying HCI really wasn't a research area. I had an NSF grant, I had publications. It was an area that certainly has done me well for the last thirty years.
Hellrigel:
Right, human-computer interaction, that goes back to the work that you did at IBM.
Cohen:
Right, right. When we did stuff at IBM, we were dealing with interfaces on small, handheld devices. It's interesting even how IBM Endicott and IBM Boca were very different. When I worked at IBM Endicott, they had a program where if you worked an extra hour Monday through Thursday you only would have to work half a day on Friday. I took advantage of that, and it gave me a little flexibility to do doctors' appointments and things I had to do with the kids. When I went to IBM Boca and I mentioned that, they said, you're lucky, you'll work at least fifty hours every week and there's no such thing as Friday afternoon off. So, that was a bit of culture shock. It was a much younger group at IBM Boca than it was at Endicott.
Hellrigel:
But was it the same kind of work?
Cohen:
It was similar. At IBM Endicott we were taking mainframe systems and we were putting a more friendly user interface on the front end. In Boca we were doing more development from scratch with handheld mobile devices. The stuff in Boca was more leading edge. I had a really great manager that was really interested in pushing things forward. They were taking advantage of some of my university experience and training and so I was working with some university grants that we were pursuing.
I ended up going to Maryland and I met Ben Shneiderman from the University of Maryland. We secured a grant for research on the IBM operating system with his people doing some of the development work. It was really interesting. I was also on the IBM committee that evaluated patents.
Hellrigel:
Wow. Do you have patents?
Cohen:
I do not.
Hellrigel:
Just thought I'd ask because sometimes they come up. The company would own them anyway.
Cohen:
Right, right, yes. Matter of fact at IBM Boca there was a woman that developed some sort of thing with your hair that you put your hair up like when you're in the shower or something. She was an IBM employee, and IBM was fighting her on the rights, even though it had nothing to do with IBM, because IBM felt that any thought you had while you're at IBM belongs to IBM. When I joined IBM, I had a couple of things brewing, some student projects that came out of my Binghamton days, so I wrote them as an exception just in case on my employment application. Nothing ever developed, but I did write that as an exception.
Hellrigel:
You're at IBM and you're in corporate America. Did you ever think about, one, creating your own company and become an entrepreneur or run a spinoff?
Cohen:
Yes. When I was in Binghamton, I was doing some work with a colleague in the Psychology Department, and we ended up getting a grant from IBM. This was IBM Oswego and the government federal systems division. They wanted to use some of the university professors to help develop the next generation helicopter interface. The psychology guy and I both went to our deans to talk about doing something together, and both of our deans were a little shortsighted. They said they wanted the whole ball of wax or none. They didn't want to split it between the schools, so we formed a company we called Southern Tier Human Factors Associates. We hired a couple of grad students. We had two faculty members and two or three grad students. Both of us did not have any summer obligations at Binghamton, so we ran it in the summer. We designed this interface. The helicopter pilots had a keyboard and a heads-up display. They had to move their heads and hands to operate the system. We wanted to develop a system that would minimize their movements, but still be efficient and productive to fly the helicopter. We had to balance which operations were better for the keyboard and which for the heads-up display. I learned a lot when we did that. We worked out the contract with IBM that they would pay us net thirty days. We had to do invoices and they waited until the full thirty days to pay us. Meanwhile, we had these students working for us, so we took money out of our pockets to make sure we could pay the students in a timely manner because we felt they needed the money. They couldn't wait for thirty days. It was a great, great experience, but it was a lot of work.
Hellrigel:
You ran that for a few years?
Cohen:
We ran it for only one year. We had to do the taxes for two years, but it really ran for one year.
Hellrigel:
It's hard to make money and it is so time consuming, teaching and a family and everything else.
Cohen:
Right, yes. Maybe we could have worked harder and looked for more contracts, but we had full time academic jobs as well. It was a great experience for the students. The students would be at our meetings and listen to our discussions and the choices we needed to make. I think they learned every decision is not black or white, there is a lot of gray and a lot of tradeoffs. We had put our data in an Excel spreadsheet. The spreadsheet was so long, we used to lay it down on the floor. At one time we were having a lot of trouble and the calculations didn’t seem right, we couldn’t figure out what was happening. Well in the upper right-hand corner of the spreadsheet in a maroon color it said memory was full. We didn’t realize we were putting in so much data, we were overflowing the system.
Hellrigel:
The document maxed out.
Cohen:
Yes, yes. There were a lot of things we all kind of learned from that.
Hellrigel:
It seems like you had fun.
Cohen:
We did have fun. Right. To be honest, if I look back at some of my experiences, I think there's some things--I am older and wiser now-- I probably would have stood up a little more about things. At that point, I probably didn't. I didn't feel I could. There's a lot more stuff we know now. But all these things put together makes me who I am and made my career, and I have no regrets.
I even remember one year we bought my son--it was a CD player, and you could record stuff, CD VCR--I want to call it a VCR, but it was probably a CD at that point. I remember we went to the store, and he needed to see the remote and he wanted to see the manual. The guy said we do not put the remotes out because they get stolen. My son turned to me, and he goes, “if I can’t see the remote how do I know I can work it?” He grew up with a lot of that. He said sometimes we used him as the remote because we'd say, change the channel. My son learned very young just how to unhook the cable box and re-install it on a different tv. We only had one cable box in the house, and he'd bring it upstairs or downstairs. I just would explain, even though I am not an engineer, but it was cable in, video out, video in, cable out. It was pretty straightforward.
Even years ago, we had a switching panel. I had two printers at one point in my house. One printer was in the den and the other printer was on my desk in the bedroom with the computer. When I was working on my dissertation the keyboard didn't bother my husband if he was sleeping, but if I printed it made too much noise. It was a dot matrix printer, so it was much noisier. We went to I want an electronic supply store like Radio Shack, got a switch, and hooked it all up. So, yes, my kids grew up always having a computer in the house.
Hellrigel:
Yes, it's a slightly younger generation, well, a lot younger than me. It's the age of my youngest sister. My parents had four children and between one and four, we have a thirteen-year gap.
Cohen:
Okay, right.
Hellrigel:
My brother and I started life with manual typewriters and my youngest sister didn't, I bought my first computer, and IBM desktop in the late 1980s. All those wires. I used to move a lot, so I took nail polish and color-coded everything on the back of the computer, the monitor, and the printer with the correct cords. This way I could quickly reassemble the computer. I said to my sister, now I have a need for your nail polish. Now everything is smaller, so much is wireless.
Cohen:
That is right.
Hellrigel:
I was interested, so you weren't a snowbird to wind up in Florida, you went for employment.
Cohen:
Right. We came full time. We came young.
Hellrigel:
Now you stay in Florida year-round?
Cohen:
Yes. Up until very, very recently we had a house in the Poconos, but to be honest we just sold it this year with the pandemic. It was too hard to keep up and travel has become problematic.
Hellrigel:
Plus moving all the time.
Cohen:
We've been in a couple of different houses here, but now we're in a condo, and it's good, and my kids are local. I have obviously more stuff I want to do. Do we want to--what do we want to do? Do you want to take a little break? Do we want to--are we going into too much detail for you?
Hellrigel:
No, no, no, this is good. We're going to Nova and then we're going to do your professional societies.
Cohen:
Okay.
Hellrigel:
Yes, so if you want to take a break--do you want to take fifteen?
Cohen:
I am okay, I am going to drink some water because my voice is getting hoarse.
Hellrigel:
Yes, no, because we're going to do Nova. Or if you want we could pick it up tomorrow or later today.
Cohen:
I do not know, maybe we should try to keep going because I feel like we're sort of on a run. Yes.
Hellrigel:
Okay. Yes, we could do that. If you wanted to break, we could. We'll see how we go. We're up to [about 90 minutes]. You might have some other commitments.
Cohen:
I am fine.
Hellrigel:
Okay. We're on schedule. You've had a very different kind of career, so there were different chapters to your life.
Cohen:
Right. I think part of it is--how do I say this? Part of it was the times we were living in. There were a lot of things that were different, and things were in flux and changing. Even when I look back at some of the technology and some of the stuff. When I was working at Broome Community College, so this is back in the 1970s, I used to have a teletype machine that I used to take home. It had an acoustic coupler, so I could do BASIC and APL. It was a time-sharing system. I remember my kids, I used to yell at them because they would run in the kitchen under the phone wire. I'd yell, do not pull the thing out of the phone. Even my kids over the years, have said to me, we had computers in the house early on, why didn't we have the web earlier? I've explained to them that machines couldn't do the graphics and the related bandwidth. Now I joke, I didn't learn to swipe until I was sixty years old, but I think kids are born today with a swiping finger. It's just so much stuff that has changed over the years.
Hellrigel:
We learned keyboarding. When I was in high school, we took typing.
Cohen:
Right, I took typing, so I still type will all my fingers. My son did take keyboarding in school. But now?
Hellrigel:
They peck.
Cohen:
They peck, right, right. I know he has a computer at his desk, and I know at his desk he probably uses more of his fingers, but he does a lot of stuff just with pecking.
And even laugh, my son is very similar to me personality-wise, but my daughter complains that she's getting like me now. I keep saying it's not so bad. My son is very much like me, and one day I said to him, we were going out somewhere, and I said, Jason, make yourself a list, because I always make a list, so he said, Mom, he goes, I am the better improved version. He said, I make a list, then I take a picture of it with my phone, and then I take my phone with me, so I do not have all the stupid pieces of paper you have lying around.
Hellrigel:
I still like paper.
Cohen:
I know, I do.
Hellrigel:
Though I am starting to take--well, really started with my students, they wouldn't write down the notes, they wanted to take pictures of the whiteboard. I was like, but you learn when you write by hand on paper and it is imprinted in your head.
Cohen:
I know. There’s a certain part of that.
Hellrigel:
Yes.
Cohen:
I know we've kind of jumped a little bit off course here, but to sort of get us back into Florida. We came to Florida. I came to IBM Boca. My husband kind of reinvented himself. He was out of work for a little bit then he reinvented himself as a software consultant. He was doing a lot of programming using Perl scripts. He did work for Motorola, both on the West Coast and then in South America.
They always had told us the IBM Boca plant would never close because all the execs loved coming to Boca. The PC was invented in Boca, so Boca had such IBM big history. Then they announced the IBM Boca plant was closing I was offered an opportunity to move to Austin, Texas.
We went on a house-hunting fact-finding trip. We decided Austin was not for us. Our kids were in Florida. My folks were in Florida. I also was concerned I was getting older. We were working on OS/2 in Boca. OS/2 did not have a good future. I was working on speech applications for OS/2, but again, all the apps were coming out for DOS. There was very little that was available for OS/2. We declined moving with IBM to Austin, and I am really glad because to be honest, two years later almost everyone I knew there got laid off. I would have been a little bit on the older side competing in the Austin marketplace. I do not think it would have been a good place for us.
Anyway, at that point I had some money, actually retraining money from IBM as part of getting laid off, and I went to the ACM SIGCHI Conference in Boston. I met this person Laurie Dringus who worked at Nova [Nova Southeastern University]. She asked me, “do want to adjunct?” The handwriting was really pretty clear at that point, so I said, let me start as an adjunct, I have nothing to lose. I worked for one year as an adjunct. By then my job was disappearing in Boca, we decided not to take the move, and then I went full-time at Nova, so that was in 1996.
Hellrigel:
You went to the ACM, so that is the Association for Computing Machinery?
Cohen:
Yes, the ACM is the Association for Computing Machinery, and it was the SIG, which is a Special Interest Group that is called the SIGCHI, which is Computer Human Interaction. It's their big flagship conference.
Hellrigel:
This is the person, Laurie Dringus, that you're going to collaborate with mostly?
Cohen:
Right. Yes, we did a few collaborations together over the years. We both were teaching HCI, so we really developed all the HCI courses at Nova. We worked for a while on trying to get a formal concentration, but we ended up with a series of about two to three courses. I brought some of my industrial experience and she was really trained more as an academic, so it was a nice combination.
When I taught at Nova, my Nova students were different than my Binghamton students. At Binghamton, I was mostly teaching undergraduate, and I taught a few master's courses, but they were traditional daytime students, traditional age. At Nova we dealt with an older population, it was more working professionals. We were doing distance education before distance education was in vogue. We had some totally online courses, and then we had some doctoral courses that we used to refer to as institute or cluster. In the cluster format the students came for two weekends a year to Florida and the rest of the time was online. In the institute format they came for one week and the rest of the time was online. The institute program had a lot of educators that would come, and it would be scheduled in July, so they were off in the summer. Then they still would be going to work full-time, but they had the summer flexibility.
Hellrigel:
Why did Nova do this distance early? Did they see the market?
Cohen:
I am not sure. Nova's kind of a funny mix. They now have a much bigger traditional presence, but at that point they were working with working professionals and professional schools. They had a Health Divisions group in Miami that then moved to Fort Lauderdale. It offered the osteopathic medicine degree. They have optometry. They have dental. They have pharmacy. They have a law school. They were one of the first law schools that was set for part-time students, so instead of the traditional law degree in three years students took four years. They really went into some of the nontraditional kinds of things. The Computer Science program at that point, when I first came, did not even have an undergraduate Computer Science program or it was very small. For a long time, they had few dorms on campus. They now have more dorms. Then they did a few smart things to acquire better undergraduates. For the medical school they would do a combined six-year program where you could do two years at Nova as an undergrad, and then double up your medical school stuff. Nova admits them to the medical school when they first got admitted as freshmen, so you didn't have that worry, am I going to get in. Nova's doing something now that I personally do not understand how it's working, but nobody asked me. They have an osteopathic school and an allopathic, so they have the DO degree and the MD degree. I think there's only three schools in the country that have both because they're competing for the same people. Now the osteopathic medicine is perceived much better. When I was growing up you didn't want to go to an osteopathic physician.
Hellrigel:
Yes, totally different methodologies.
Cohen:
Right. Now a lot of them are having similar internship, so it's very different. They have a pharmacy school. Like I mentioned, my daughter happens to work in the pharmacy school even though she's not a pharmacist. They're very concerned with the pharmacists having leadership skills, and her degree is in educational leadership. She teaches leadership, professionalism, and all of that stuff. That is not so much the science behind the pharmacy, but it's being a working professional and continued lifelong learning.
Hellrigel:
Yes, the human element.
Cohen:
Right. She even does some teaching with that. I remember when we were doing some of the transitioning to online. I had one term where I had a class and we were going to be fully online. At the end of the course, half the students said the thing they loved about the class was that it was fully online, and the other half said the thing they hated about the class was that it was fully online. It's so funny talking about this in 2021 because now, yes.
Hellrigel:
The same dilemma.
Cohen:
Right, right. I know that a lot of the discussions were how do you know that people are not cheating online, but to be honest, when we did our institute or cluster formats you'd see the people in real life, so you got to know them. I gave differing kinds of assignments, so you could tell if somebody was cheating. It was just as obvious as if they were in class cheating. What I also found with most of the older, more mature students, they were there because they wanted the education. Even if it was, they just wanted the credential. When I taught undergraduates if you let class go a little early, they'd be, oh, good, we can leave early. When I started teaching at Nova, if you let them go early, they were like, I am paying for this, I want my full class time.
Hellrigel:
Exactly.
Cohen:
It was a very different attitude. Then again, I think I could appreciate also doing my Ph.D. later in life. I understand that you have family, and you have work obligations. A lot of people are that sandwich generation. Speaking of sandwich generation, I remember teaching my father how to use a mouse. My father was an engineer, and when he got his first computer, I was trying to show him how to go on the web. He wanted to research cars. He said, “well, how do I look it up?” This was before we were Googling everything. I said, “Dad, put in www.toyota.com.” He said, “How do you know that?” It's like, just put it in. And matter of fact, I did get my father a part-time gig when I was at IBM. We were looking for subjects for some of our usability labs, so I had to bring him up to speed a little bit on some of the technology. He came to the lab and as an engineer he was a really good test subject because he could do technical stuff. It was neat, and I think he enjoyed that, too.
Hellrigel:
Did your mom want to become a test subject?
Cohen:
No, no. I think she was glad he was out of the house for a few hours.
Hellrigel:
Yes, sometimes retirement brings too much together time.
Cohen:
Right, right, right.
Hellrigel:
That is what my late aunt said.
Cohen:
Yes. It was good. I think it was good for him and he enjoyed it. He was one of the few people of his generation that did not have their VCR clock always blinking at 12:00. He knew how to record shows.
Hellrigel:
He could help his buddies then.
Cohen:
Right, right, yes. All my parents' friends used to call him to do that. Years ago, my mother ended up having some Alzheimer's and lost her memory a little bit, and Broward went to 10-digit dialing, I remember one of my mother's friends said your mother can't remember if she has an appointment, but she never forgets my phone number. I said, my father programmed it into her phone, so when it went to 10-digit dialing my mother just pressed button 2 for Mildred. That is the stuff that computers should be able to do. Why does my mother at 70-something years old have to know Broward is now using 10-digit dialing and why does her life have to be more complicated? There's no reason for that.
Hellrigel:
Right, but it does make me a little nervous. I can remember phone numbers from when I used to have to dial them, but nowadays I do not know newer phone numbers, and I feel a little incomplete.
Cohen:
Right. I worry if my cell phone is lost and if I should lose my contacts, I am in trouble.
Hellrigel:
Yes. You're working now at Nova, and you've jumped back into academia. How is that transition?
Cohen:
It was good. I loved working in industry, and I liked IBM Endicott, but I liked IBM Boca a little bit more because we were designing the interface on the front end and designing what was important from a human viewpoint from the beginning. We had the Human Factors Group in all the development meetings. At IBM Endicott we were dealing more with legacy systems and trying to put a more friendly front end on it.
Hellrigel:
At IBM what were you working for? Like telephone companies who were making the cells phones?
Cohen:
We were dealing with a lot of mid-range kinds of systems. I can't think of the IBM number now for what they were. We were just dealing with a better interface, so it just didn't have the DOS command line interface. We were putting on a menu-driven front end. It wasn't even as sophisticated as now where you could touch and buttons and all that other stuff. Whereas the development of buttons and icons and objects and touchable things was the stuff we were developing at IBM Boca. I worked on some of their early speech systems and the interfaces for them. We were developing interfaces for some of the small handheld devices. Some other companies got ahead of us, so some of IBM's devices never hit the market.
Hellrigel:
You were made to jump because the industry was changing?
Cohen:
Right, yes.
Hellrigel:
You moved to academia, so you're back into teaching, and now you're primarily teaching grad students.
Cohen:
Right, yes. At Nova I taught master's and Ph.D. students.
Hellrigel:
Regarding distance learning, how was the transition to distance learning as opposed to face-to-face classroom teaching? Did you find that unsettling?
Cohen:
At the beginning it was hard, but we had some really good tools at Nova. We had these things called ECRs which were Electronic Classrooms. Students had to have a certain minimal set of computer equipment to enroll in the class. Otherwise, they couldn't use some of the tools, but the tools were nothing like they are today. If you had a lot of students and your cameras all open, you'd be in trouble because you just didn't have the bandwidth. I remember things were just slow. You'd wait a bit for stuff to load. I really didn't have trouble with the transition because I think the students were motivated, and you knew that they couldn't come to a class every Wednesday. I didn't do this, but some people did hold office hours say every Wednesday at 9:00, in addition to the material. If I did do office hours, I always made them optional because my feeling is a student that wanted to take a class every Wednesday at 9:00 would not be enrolled in our program. They often were traveling or had other obligations. I used to make my office hours optional, and then I'd always record them. You would have transcripts, but you had to read the whole transcript. Nothing had hyperlinks where you could zip around. Maybe I also have done it for so long and now it's so much part of my DNA, I am just used to it.
Hellrigel:
Nova spent the time to train you?
Cohen:
They did. They had training. At the beginning we had a lot of help from the IT Department to set things up. You had a Help Desk 24 hours a day, seven days a week. When the students would come into class, I would take their pictures and then I'd make for myself a PDF file with their pictures. Now, as I am saying it, when initially I started teaching it was just all this typing at the bottom. I do not even think we did much audio. I think a lot of it was typing and we certainly didn't have the video. I'd have the pictures of my people next to me, so at least I could identify them. I had one student, when she started her Ph.D., she was in Florida for the coursework, and then her family moved to Singapore. So, when she finished her Ph.D., we did it all from Singapore. The only thing, we used to laugh, was we were twelve hours apart. So, one time we had an appointment at 9 a.m. my time, and it was 9 p.m. her time, and I was really surprised she didn't show up. I sent her an email, I didn't hear, I went to bed. The next morning, I got an email. She says, I am so embarrassed. She said, I went to lie down with my kids to put them to bed and I fell asleep, and then I slept through our appointment. This was when things were also getting more video-oriented, and she gave me a tour of Singapore out of her window. Yes, the technology worked, and it allowed these students the opportunity to go back and do their Ph.D. They may not have had the opportunity to do it when they were traditionally right out of college. Some of them were women. We had a pretty good-sized women contingent in our programs at Nova
Hellrigel:
When you're teaching these classes, how large are the classes, maybe one dozen people?
Cohen:
I'd say when I first started, the classes were probably about fifteen to twenty students. When I left, we had classes as big as forty, forty-five.
Hellrigel:
Yes, that is a difference. You're primarily teaching the human-computer interaction, the HCI.
Cohen:
Right.
Hellrigel:
You and Laurie developed these courses.
Cohen:
Yes, right. Oh, go ahead.
Hellrigel:
Then you supervised Ph.D. students. How many students did you have over your career there?
Cohen:
I had a lot of Ph.D. students. It was a pretty intensive program. When I retired, I had graduated close to 100 Ph.D. students. I usually had between seven to ten Ph.D. students at a time. Now, remember, our Ph.D. program was very different than the traditional Ph.D. program. I didn't have a lab and the students were working on my problems in my lab. Often, sometimes, the students brought problems they had at work, and that is what they were working on for their dissertation. Sometimes had some stuff that I had some interest in and they were pursuing as well. The problems that they worked on were very practical, they weren't really theoretical.
We had a few people at Nova that were in the military, so the military paid for them to go back to school. A lot of them had done their twenty years in the military, twenty, twenty-five years, whatever it is to retire, and then they wanted to be consultants later, so getting a Ph.D. opened those doors for them. Sometimes our students weren't there necessarily for the education, they were there for the credential, so it was a different kind of focus. I still strongly felt, and most of my colleagues did as well, that there was quality in the program. We did lose students, it's not necessarily that they flunked out, but they would drop out because it was too hard to keep their job, keep school, keep whatever personal obligations they had. When I first started at Nova, they were a little bit looser, like you could be in the program forever, then they tightened it to seven or ten years.
Hellrigel:
While you're doing this, did you have a lab? Your research was mostly based on educational projects?
Cohen:
My research was based on more educational type things. Sometimes I was able to piggyback off some of my students' projects. Then I was doing more in the educational arena, so looking at distance learning, looking at discussion boards, how did those things work for people, participation in them. I did a lot of conferences at the Frontiers in Education Conference, so they were education-based. I also had started even way back when I was in Binghamton. I knew that I didn't have a typical lab with grad students to do some of my research. At Binghamton I was really considered teaching faculty. I did quite a bit of work for publishers, reviewing books and reviewing software kinds of things. I did some of this consulting, like I mentioned previously. I taught at IBM's retraining program. I did the project when we hired students and we did the consulting for IBM Oswego. I did some short-term kinds of things just because it worked for me.
Hellrigel:
At some universities you might not be in Computer Science, maybe you would have been in education or a dual appointment.
Cohen:
I might have, yes. Nova had several different tracks. We had a straight Computer Science track. We had an IS track, Information Systems track. We had a Computing Technology in Education track. I taught HCI across the different tracks with differing emphasis depending on what course I was teaching. In CS we were dealing more with the programming things. In the Education we would deal with using tools to facilitate education. So, I sort of had different twists to the courses. Now, I believe that they've merged, so the straight Computer Science is still there, the IS is still there, but the Computer Technology in Education has moved off to the Education school.
Hellrigel:
Yes, that is a whole separate thing when technology for teaching used to be an overhead machine.
Cohen:
Right, right, yes. That is why a lot of those institutes we used to do, we used to do them January and July because that is when teachers were off. It's the first week in January and then July because that was a time they could take a week, come to campus, and then kind of go back and do their day job, as we used to call it.
Hellrigel:
Right. So, in conjunction with this you also wrote or co-authored a textbook.
Cohen:
Yes. One of the things that I got involved with was doing a lot of stuff for publishers and reviewing books. I had met Ben Shneiderman from a contract that we did at IBM. It was really exciting for me because Ben Shneiderman is one of the pioneers of HCI, I've used his book through the years, and I read his material and followed his research for a long time. I do not know if you're aware that in programming they used to do flow charts, and then they went to something called structure charts or Nassi-Shneiderman charts.
Hellrigel:
No, I am not familiar.
Cohen:
It's a tool that people used to use to set up their programs. Well, the Nassi-Shneiderman chart is that same Shneiderman. So, anyway, to make a long story short, I was doing a review for the publisher and Ben was going to do the fifth edition of his book. He really liked some of what I said in the review, so he set up an interview with myself and another person, Steve Jacobs. He asked us if we would like to be kind of--we weren't full co-authors, we were collaborators on the book. We said yes, and there was an author team. Shneiderman had started originally writing the books himself, then he expanded and added Catherine Plaisant, who was a researcher at University of Maryland, and then he had a few other people that were on the team. I am just going to grab my books for a second.
Hellrigel:
The two editions.
Cohen:
There are two editions, right. This is the fifth edition. I tell people if they want to look for me, I am on the back cover of the book. I am not listed on the front. It just says Ben Schneiderman and Catherine Plaisant, but I am featured on the back cover of the book; written in collaboration with. It was me and Steve Jacobs, Ben, and Catherine. It was actually a great, great opportunity for me. Sometimes I used to pinch myself. I can't believe I have Ben Shneiderman in my contact list. He let us run with a lot of the stuff. He was just great as far as a mentor to learn from and with, and Catherine was also wonderful. And Steve and I bonded and became friends over it, and we worked well together. So, it really went well, and then they decided to do the sixth edition, and so the sixth edition, I am on the front of the book.
Hellrigel:
You're one of the major authors.
Cohen:
Right. Then we expanded it to another guy that was at University of Maryland as well. So, yes, I was one of the main authors of the book. We kind of kept with some of the same chapters we oversaw before, and then, of course, the field was changing. What I am sort of sad about is I think the book right now is overdue for another edition. I think all of us are sort of too tired and too old to do that, and between the pandemic and textbook publishing changing. Even when we did this last edition, a lot of the authors could choose only certain chapters, they didn't have to get the whole book, and it became electronic as well. It was a great, great opportunity. I am really proud of myself being a co-author on a book in my field that I worked really hard to be a part of for many years.
Hellrigel:
Did you use this in your courses?
Cohen:
I did. I used it in my courses, and it's a textbook that is used by a lot of HCI courses. I just feel bad now because it's a little bit dated. Now everybody's going more into more of the web design, and what I am going to call the quick and dirty how do you get an interface up and running, as opposed to some of the theory behind it.
Hellrigel:
They just want to do it.
Cohen:
They just want to do it, right. And look at the people that you have that are using this stuff. The kids today, they've grown up with the web. They've grown up with interfaces. They expect it to work. They expect to be able to point and click. They expect to be able to use voice. They have a whole different set of expectations.
Hellrigel:
When I explained to one of my nephews who's eighteen years old that you can print by hitting control P, he's like, what? I was like, yes, just hit control P.
Cohen:
Right. I still use control V, control C.
Hellrigel:
I use that all the time.
Cohen:
Yes, yes, right. I remember when I did an early part of Word Perfect, I used to have that little template that used to sit across the keyboard.
Hellrigel:
Me, too.
Cohen:
If you didn't have the template--I do not know, I am looking if it's in my desk--if you didn't have the template. I also want to pull out another prop that I have. You may know what this is. This is a wire that Grace Hopper used to give out at her talks. She gave it out at her talks. It was how far electricity travels in a nanosecond.
Hellrigel:
Oh, and what's that? About one foot?
Cohen:
It's probably a little more. But anyway, Grace Hopper came to Endicott when we were at IBM. I remember my husband and I both went to hear her speak. It was really exciting, and she gave out these wires, which I obviously still have. I feel like I need to put a label on it or when I die my kids are going to throw it out and say why did she keep this.
Hellrigel:
It should go to a museum. Every place you've moved you've taken it with you.
Cohen:
I know. One of the last conferences I went to before I retired was the Grace Hopper conference and I chaired one of the HCI sessions there. It was very exciting just to be in a room--there were men there too--but just so many women, and they really encouraged the women to network. So, I was sitting next to two young women on either side of me, and I said, oh, I heard Grace Hopper speak. I might as well have said that I was at Abraham Lincoln's inauguration. They looked at me like I was so old. I remember I went back to my room, and I Googled her. She only died in 1994.
Yes, my book was used in my classes. Here is another kind of funny story to sort of share. When I did the fifth edition we had a limited budget for pictures, and I remember saying to Catherine, “what do I do?” She said, “use your kids. It's easy to get an approval.” I do have a picture of my son playing Guitar Hero. I do not know what chapter and I do not know if I have it marked in here. Like I said, my son was a teacher, and one day he forwards an email to me. He said, “Mom, I got this email, and you have to see it.” It said, Dear Mr. Cohen, I do not know if you remember me, but I was in your class in high school. You taught math. Now I am in college, and I am taking a course, and I think you're in my textbook. It looks like you. My son wrote back, saying yes, it is true because my mother, is one of the co-authors in the book. She took my picture and put me in the book. It was quite funny. Here it is.
Hellrigel:
Cool.
Cohen:
He even had a West Boca shirt on. It was just funny that he recognized that. Then in the sixth edition I have my granddaughter. This one I have marked.
Hellrigel:
Cool. Are your grandchildren technically inclined?
Cohen:
My granddaughter, I just have one granddaughter, and to be honest, she's grown up with her parents’ using computers and with me using computers. I have a portable keyboard and when she was little, she sometimes worked on her keyboard while I was working on mine. She knows that she is in the book. I've tried to encourage her to do some coding, like Scratch and Scratch, Jr. I can't get her to spend much time with it, but she's doing Roblox where the kids build virtual worlds and stuff. She's doing some of that, but I wouldn't call her a computer person. Certainly, she can text, she can do stuff. Matter of fact, she didn't like the backgrounds my husband and I had on our cell phones and our iPads, so she changed it for us.
Hellrigel:
Oh, my she changed it. Well, yes, it was the human interface, and a little marketing.
Cohen:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
The textbooks were a success and you've also published in many technical journals.
Cohen:
Yes. My research has been stuff that is a little bit what I kind of call on the fringe. What I mean by on the fringe, is I never had a lab with grad students assisting with my research, I just had a different environment. I tried to capitalize on the tools, the techniques, and the skills that I had, so that is why a lot of them were educational types of things. I did some work with some of my colleagues at Nova. If you look at my résumé, you'll see a lot of things was jointly co-authored. So, yes. I used to tell myself, and even I remember when Laurie Dringus and I would kind of talk about things, I'd say, I saw Ben Shneiderman's lab. The stuff he turns out, we're not even close to doing that. We never had like a real lab. We had some small things that we could do. We were lucky we had the web as our lab. The web was out there, but I never had a dedicated lab with equipment and machinery and stuff like that.
Hellrigel:
Would you have wanted a lab?
Cohen:
Probably at certain points I would have. I think, though, I never could be one of these professors that my students would work at my lab and when I was ready to let go of them, that is when they would graduate. I didn't want them to be my graduate student slaves. I do not think I could do that.
Hellrigel:
Right. This then leads us into the topic that your publications and you reviewed a lot of books for publishers, but you also wrote a number of reviews. This brings us into your professional organizations. Which organizations have you been a member of? You've been a member of ACM since 1979. Is that your first professional organization?
Cohen:
Yes, right. My first one was probably ACM, and I've been in that for a long time. I've always been interested also in the special interest groups, the SIGCSE which is the Computer Science Education, and I was in the SIGCHI which is the Computer Human Interaction group. At one point I was teaching multimedia, so I was more into the multimedia stuff. I haven't done that in a while, so I am really out of date on some of that. Then I joined IEEE. I joined IEEE initially from the Computer Society, then I went to full membership, and I used IEEE for a long time.
From a practical viewpoint, IEEE had really good plans for life insurance. When my husband and I were raising our family we had IEEE life insurance, and at that point the member could buy guaranteed life insurance for a certain amount, and then the spouse was half. We had to have a pretty high number because I wanted to make sure I was prepared if something happened to my husband. He had a lot more than he probably needed if something happened to me. I think now those laws are gone. I think now it's the same.
Hellrigel:
Yes, I am not sure. He was probably a member of the mechanical engineers.
Cohen:
Right. For a long time, he was in ASME, and then when he went into programming, he dropped that. I did encourage him a bunch of years ago when he was doing some Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning for large buildings, HVAC. I encouraged him to write a couple of papers and he did write them and got them published, so that was exciting for him.
Yes, I was involved in IEEE. My father had been a member of IRE, which was the precursor to IEEE, and my father became a licensed professional engineer at one point in California, because in California you didn't need a four-year degree. I do know when my father passed, I actually wrote IEEE because I wanted his membership to show as terminated, not that he just, I do not know disappeared. I got a really nice letter back. I do not have it anymore, but they said thank you for letting us know, and this way we'll close his record officially, as opposed to the mail gets returned and then it stops coming, so I thought that was really nice. That might have been a form letter, but it still made me feel good.
Then years and years ago I did some stuff with the local chapter in Binghamton of ACM and IEEE. We used to hold a lot of joint meetings because the IEEE people always had more money. ACM, we could often get a grant to pay the speaker, but then we could use the IEEE money to get refreshments for students and stuff. We used to hold them jointly, and then jointly we'd have a better turnout. As you know with students if you feed them, they will come. I did that for many years. I always wanted to do some volunteer stuff, but to be honest, between trying to do what publications I could, raising my family, working, there just weren't enough hours in my day, so I kind of let that slide. I did some professional service in Binghamton; I was one of the honorary setup members of the UPE, the Upsilon Pi Epsilon, which was the Honor Society for the Computer Sciences.
Then we set up a UPE chapter at Nova as well, so I was one of the charter members on that. But I am going to say it was more of a group that we set up. In Binghamton, the group, because we had more traditional students, used to hold bagel things and they tutored other students. At Nova we had working professionals. No one was on campus, so it was a different kind of group.
Then while I still was working, I went to a couple of ABET conferences on becoming an ABET program evaluator. I did the ABET training while I still was working. I've been doing ABET stuff, I guess this is my fourth year. I am in a cycle right now. I volunteered this year for two visits because I figured we didn't have to travel. I just forgot I had to read all those self-studies, so that took a lot of time, even though I got to eat and sleep in my own house. But anyway, so yes, I've been doing that, and I've really enjoyed that. My feeling is in a few years my knowledge may be out of date on curriculum and things like that.
I started getting involved in IEEE in the Life Members group, and I've been in that for a couple of years. I am also on the Admissions and Advancement group, and I've also been doing this for a while. When I became an IEEE Senior Member, I offered to be a volunteer to review applications.
I also did a lot of reviewing of fellowships for NSF and the Department of Defense. I did a lot of those things over the years. I felt like that was something I was good at.
Some of the activities from the IEEE History Committee I've been involved in include the Middleton Book Prize reviews and some of the grants. Scott, who's the head of the Life Members group has been putting me in charge of a lot of the grant proposals because he feels my academic experience is helpful in the evaluations.
Hellrigel:
You can review those.
Cohen:
Yes. I've done those and that’s been good. I am getting a little bit more involved in the IEEE Society on Social Implications of Technology (SSIT). I haven't done much with them, but now I put myself as a member of that group and I am planning on attending their virtual conference.
Hellrigel:
Are you still a member of the IEEE Computer Society?
Cohen:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
You're a member of the Computer Society and SSIT, so how about any other societies?
Cohen:
Not at IEEE anymore. I did the IEEE Systems, Man and Cybernetics Society (SMCS) years ago because that was where the HCI stuff was.
Hellrigel:
You became involved in IEEE also because you were giving papers at conferences.
Cohen:
Right, right. I published and presented in the Frontiers in Education in IEEE many times.
Hellrigel:
It's really the job at Nova that got you more involved with IEEE conferences?
Cohen:
Yes, probably with Nova I became a little bit more IEEE and less ACM-oriented and at Nova we had an IEEE student group. We didn't have--maybe at the end we had an ACM group.
Hellrigel:
Were you an advisor when you would go to these things?
Cohen:
I was just an advisor for the UPE, but somebody else was on the IEEE.
Hellrigel:
How about Boca? You have an IEEE chapter, so do you go to IEEE meetings?
Cohen:
I am really, really surprised in Boca. There's no Life Members group. We have a huge number of Life Members.
Hellrigel:
You've got to create one.
Cohen:
I know, it's on my list. I am really surprised at Boca because we have IBM, we have Motorola, and obviously we're retiree central here. I am really surprised that there isn't a chapter. I am a member of the IBM Quarter Century Club down here. They do some of what I'd say are similar to the IEEE Life Members group activities, but you have to be affiliated with IBM. I have gone to a few of those but remember the last two years everything has gone virtual. There is an IEEE Palm Beach section, and I've gone to a couple of their meetings. Most of the time the subject hasn't been of interest to me, and it's been very small, like six people.
Hellrigel:
You're a member of that section?
Cohen:
I am a member of the IEEE Palm Beach section.
Hellrigel:
Yes, it's where you fall geographically.
Cohen:
Yes, yes.
Hellrigel:
In regard to IEEE Life Members, about four years ago I went to the Harrisburg, Pennsylvania group's first meeting. They were expanding the Penn State Harrisburg engineering programs. I do not know how it is, I think you need X number of people to sign up, and I do not know how laborious it is, but Boca, that is ground zero for retirement people, too.
Cohen:
I know. I got in touch with somebody that I met through IEEE that was a student of mine at Nova in the master's class that is involved on the West Coast section, Andy Seely. It's kind of funny, he had me come to a meeting they were having a little while ago and we've been talking about maybe piggybacking off some of their stuff, and then maybe extending it to the East Coast. Right now, nobody's really doing face-to-face, so I do not know if I want to go dragging over to Tampa for things. It's funny because he had me as his instructor in his master's program, but he never really met me before. He met me on the Zoom call, so it was very funny. Yes, I am really surprised, to be honest, that there isn't much more here in Boca.
Hellrigel:
Yes, well, I guess people do not think about it, but the Life Members Committee has been pretty active, or maybe it's just because I meet the people that are very active.
Cohen:
Right, right. I am really not sure, and it's something in my head that I may pursue. It's just right now I am doing a lot of volunteer work, and I feel like especially with the ABET stuff, the last couple weeks I feel like I am working again and it's a little too much.
Hellrigel:
You're doing ABET and you're doing IEEE Life Members Committee. How did you get involved with Life Members? Did you get a letter that says now you're a Life Member come on down?
Cohen:
Yes. When the total number reaches 100.
Hellrigel:
Right, when the total number reaches100.
Cohen:
Right, it's 100. Your age and your years in IEEE. When that equals 99 you get a little note that says it's coming, and you're going to become a Life Member. They start including you on the newsletters. Then I became a Life Member. Senior Membership you apply for; Life Member just happens when the right numbers come together. I do not know, I had gotten something about the newsletter, and I saw they were looking for people, and I just kind of decided I am going to pursue it. Then it's funny, I have two sort of small-world stories. I had had a correspondence with Scott Atkinson a few years ago. He arranged this technical tour in Austin, Texas, and my husband and I were interested. The timing wasn't great for us, but when I first contacted Scott about Life Members, I thought, his name sounded really familiar to me. Then sure enough, I searched for him in my email, and I found that I had corresponded with him about that tour, which I thought was a really interesting thing. Again, my husband is a technical guy as well, so I thought it would be interesting. I know IEEE. It's a good organization that has been part of me for a long time, so I do think a little fondly right now of my father and how he would be really proud that I became an IEEE Life Member and that I am on this committee. I met Scott. Then Howard Wolfman and I had been at a wedding together in New York a bunch of years ago. It was somebody he knew from IBM. I worked with his daughter at IBM Boca, and we were both at the wedding together.
Hellrigel:
That is a small world.
Cohen:
It's a small world. Yes, yes. Sometimes it's a small world. But like I said, I am surprised that there's really nothing going on in South Florida. I do not know if everyone's just busy playing golf and tennis, and I do not do that.
Hellrigel:
It could be. It's hard to say.
Cohen:
For a while I thought of volunteering at a local high school. My son and son-in-law are in a high school, but I think they didn't want me, so I need another place to go. I still would like to see more in the way of STEM education. I think it's really important for the girls. There still is that big discrepancy. The girls like the computers and they do stuff on the computers, but then they get in middle school, and they go to those labs, and they're just turned off.
Hellrigel:
They become disengaged, yes.
Cohen:
Yes, yes. I even find for my granddaughter, I do not mean that I arbitrarily throw math problems her way, but I do make her do some math stuff. I make her do some calculation stuff. We talk about different things that are math and computer related. I let her show me her games and her virtual worlds that she's building. When I looked at IEEE, I investigated the Women in Engineering for a long time, but I kind of felt like I could add a little bit more to the Life Members, and that is why I kind of went that way.
Hellrigel:
Yes, and many of the Life Members that I've met have been gentlemen.
Cohen:
Have been what?
Hellrigel:
Men, gentlemen.
Cohen:
Oh, right, right. Yes.
Hellrigel:
Yes, so I haven't met too many women, but it's probably because that cohort is just coming up. This has been one of the issues with finding Life Fellows for the oral history. Percentagewise, there are fewer women engineers and IEEE Fellows. It's one’s career. Perhaps it's also due to politics and who gets their buddies appointed and moved up.
Cohen:
Right. Like I said earlier, we were talking about my research and stuff, and I looked at the Life Fellow; I do not think I have what the Life Fellow stuff takes. How do I say this? It's something we may want to edit out later. If I was a man, I may have had more opportunities to go in that direction.
Hellrigel:
Yes, because you would have made it as an educator. You could have become an IEEE Fellow as an educator because you are a pioneer in distance education.
Cohen:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
Quite honestly, Mike Geselowitz and I were kind of taken aback when we looked you up and you weren't an IEEE Fellow.
Cohen:
Oh, really?
Hellrigel:
Yes, we thought you were an IEEE Fellow.
Cohen:
Yes, when I look at some of the fellow stuff though, I think they've done a lot more of what I call leading-edge research.
Hellrigel:
But they have educators too. Educator is a group in the list of IEEE Fellows categories.
Cohen:
I even went to one of those Zoom calls on the IEEE Fellowship application. Maybe I am cutting myself short, but I just didn't know if I had the credentials. There is some sort of a distinguished something that they're looking at now, and that might be something. I forgot what it's called.
Hellrigel:
Yes, I do not know. I haven't heard that, but I know that they're reviewing the whole process of becoming an IEEE Fellow. Yes, we were shocked, and even though we're supposed to be focusing on Life Fellows, I said, we're making an exception.
Cohen:
Thank you. Yes, and no, I am a product of my time, and I do not mean that in a bad way.
Hellrigel:
No, it just is. It is what it is.
Cohen:
It is. It just is what it is. If I was a few years younger, things would have been very different, and if I was a few years older, they would have been really different as well. I did make a conscious decision not to go into engineering, and I am glad I didn't go into engineering.
Hellrigel:
Because? Why did you make that decision not to go into engineering? You mentioned earlier that maybe it was not feeling comfortable because there were so few women enrolled in college engineering programs.
Cohen:
I think I am much more outgoing now. I am much surer of myself. I think I would have just gotten eaten up. I think every day would have been a battle, and yes, I like what I am doing. I found something that is a good match for me. Why should I have every day be a battle? I did once have a supervisor say to me, he said I am never going to succeed because I made two mistakes. I looked at him and I said, what do you mean, I made two mistakes? I said, you mean two mistakes today? He said, no, you made two mistakes. He said, you had a family and you got married. And I was like--
Hellrigel:
Because it was held against women.
Cohen:
Yes, absolutely, right. I even toyed awhile with going to medical school, too. I toyed with that, but at that point I had met my husband and I wanted to get married. Now you watch TV, and you see people can be married, but that wasn't a model then.
Hellrigel:
Right. Yes, and I noticed that you also minored with chemistry.
Cohen:
I did all the pre-med courses.
Hellrigel:
Yes. People thought if you got married you would have kids and then leave the workforce and not have a career. When I was in graduate school the senior men, the senior professors were talked about how they used to make decisions. If they were alive now, they would be at least one hundred years old. They said, yes, they would see applications coming in and they're like, oh, it's a woman, she's going to get married, she's going to have kids, and she is] not going to use this Ph.D. So, the fellowships and funding should go to the male graduate school applications. Their decisions already cut out avenues for women, people do not recognize that, and it still happens these days.
Cohen:
Yes. Oh, no, there's still some stuff. I read an interesting study awhile ago about looking for people to perform in an orchestra. They do them now as blind auditions so they can't tell if the person performing is a man or a woman. There's no conversation, so you do not hear the person talk. They just come and they do their performance. They rate the performance, and then they meet the person. It's been different and a lot more women have gotten those positions.
Hellrigel:
That probably should be an option for conductors because women have had such a hard time getting conductorships.
Cohen:
You're seeing things in the world that--physicians, you see still a lot more physicians--the OBGYN, a lot of them now have gone to women, but you still do not see a lot of women surgeons.
Hellrigel:
No, but med school in the United States has gone 50/50 now.
Cohen:
Right, it's 50/50, and so has law school, but engineering has not.
Hellrigel:
No, it's still 20 percent, maybe 22 percent.
Cohen:
Yes. One of the things I used to love at some of the conferences I used to go to, the engineering conferences, there was never a line at the ladies' room. It was great.
Hellrigel:
Even in the history of technology, I've been a member of that group since 1984, there have been fewer women. Then it went boom and now it's a little different. My first IEEE conference, I went to ASEE. I presented a paper. Oh, were you a member of ASEE?
Cohen:
I was never a member of ASEE. One of the guys on my dissertation committee was big in ASEE, and I looked into that, but I never went to their conferences.
Hellrigel:
I went to an ASEE conference, and I gave a paper on oral history, a project I am working on with a physics professor and IEEE member. I want to go meet the IEEE Education Committee, so I go into their meeting room, and I got my backpack with my computer and all my stuff. I am wearing my standard academic/professional attire, a blue button-down shirt, a black blazer, and khaki pants. I entered the room, introduced myself, and so someone asked me if I could get them more water and glassed. I have all my stuff on my back, and I am like, no, I am just here to introduce myself. This was, I want to say, the summer of 2016.
Cohen:
Yes, yes. That is one of the things I've been surprised a little bit with IEEE, especially the Life Members Committee. There's some stuff, I am like, I thought that stuff was like 1970 and we're now in 2021. Yes, there's been a few things that I've been surprised by, but I have to say, one of the things about Scott, he has been really, really welcoming me, and he lets me interrupt him, he lets me do things. It's been good.
Hellrigel:
So, you've found a new home. You retired. Did you just feel it was time to retire from Nova?
Cohen:
In 2017, to be honest, they had a buyout, and I probably wasn't ready to retire. I probably was going to retire a year or two later, but it was one of those things. They made me an offer I couldn't refuse, so I did retire from full-time teaching. I had agreed to keep my dissertation students that I was still working with. I had no more faculty meeting obligations and class obligations, but I kept my students. My last student graduated in November 2019. I wanted to see my Ph.D. students until the end. Probably in 2016 I was really hesitant to take on new students. I was watching because I knew at some point I would be retiring. Yes, it was good, but first year was hard on me. I really wasn't ready. My husband retired in 2011 and he walked out of work and never looked back.
Hellrigel:
Wow. Does he play golf or anything?
Cohen:
He doesn't play golf. He's doing some work as a volunteer for the Palm Beach County Sheriff, although that has been on hold with the pandemic. He also works in a food pantry one day a week. When he first retired, he was working more, but he's now working one day a week. He does every Thursday from 8:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. My volunteer work is all over the place, so that is kind of a little different from him. We do help with our granddaughter. When she was doing virtual school, my kids had to be at work, so she came and lived with us from Tuesday to Wednesday so she could do her schooling here. She Facetimed with her parents who live in town, but it's just her parents were working, and we were trying to minimize our exposure a little bit. We pick her up usually once or twice a week and spent time with her, so it's good. We only have one grandchild, so she gets a lot of our attention.
Hellrigel:
She gets your focus.
Cohen:
Right, right, right.
Hellrigel:
So, you'll teach her how to drive.
Cohen:
I know. Yes, she's good. She's really good with the computer stuff. She's really good at math, so we're encouraging that as well. She was here last night for dinner, and we did flash cards with state capitals. I am relearning my state capitals. I didn't remember what the state capital was for Montana. Helena.
Hellrigel:
I tried to get my nieces and nephew to let me teach them how to read a road map, but that was to no avail. It is a skill that they have no idea about.
Cohen:
Yes, some of the kids know some with Dora the Explorer. They did some stuff with math. But yes, I know, there's certain things that they do not do.
Hellrigel:
I guess I've kept you for a long time. Is there anything you would like to add?
Cohen:
No. I think I went off on a lot of tangents, which I hope are helpful. We'll see if there's some we want to kind of cut out, or you can help me with some of the political stuff. I am pleased that you're interviewing me because I think my experiences were signs of the times, and I think when my generation goes people are not going to even understand that there were some struggles. I think that stuff is going to--like now, there's just a lot more principals, assistant principals, women faculty members. But I think for engineering, engineering still needs to work harder to get more women in engineering. I think we're not quite doing it yet.
Hellrigel:
You reminded me of one last topic. I interviewed someone last weekend and I asked them for their advice to young people. They said think about who you marry. They said if you have some aspirations or dreams, but the person, your partner doesn't have them, maybe you should think about that. Your life seems to be a prime example of one of my sayings for myself, win with the cards you have.
Cohen:
Right.
Hellrigel:
You've done that quite well.
Cohen:
Thank you. I do feel sometimes from my husband that we were going on paths that people hadn't taken. When I said my father said how could I leave Arnie with the kids. Nobody would have said a word to me if my husband had to be out of town two months. I think my kids did well with that. There are certain things. At one point I really wanted to take a teaching assignment in Malaysia, but the kids were in high school, and I was very worried I'd mess them up. They would have missed a year of school. I look back and that was really stupid. Our family, we wouldn't see them, it would be so far. If I could've turned the clock back, I should've done that. I think we would've gained more from the opportunity than we would have lost. But we made the decision, for better or worse.
Hellrigel:
You are pretty content with the path you've taken?
Cohen:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
If you were to give the young professionals in IEEE some advice, what would you say?
Cohen:
I think I would say go a little bit with your gut. If something feels good, try it, even if you do not know where it's going to lead. To be honest, for us, if we didn't have our stint in Indiana, I do not think my husband would have gotten into IBM Endicott. So, maybe Indiana wasn't the best move for us, but it opened some doors for him. I think what I would say, like I said, is kind of go with your gut, if something feels right. Do not be afraid to try things because most things are reversible.
Hellrigel:
Right. Then also the point you made that when you've had enough you exit. For example, with Binghamton you decided, okay, this isn't going to work. I am not going to beat myself up about this. I am going to explore other opportunities.
Cohen:
Right.
Hellrigel:
Then you're making the jump to do more volunteering which is quite common as people slow down their career or they retire. They get more involved with volunteering, so IEEE is one of your volunteering venues.
Cohen:
Yes. I think it's good because some of the stuff I am doing is kind of keeping my head going a little bit, especially with my mother having Alzheimer’s. That is not a route I want to go down. I do not know what's going to help me, but I feel like this can't hurt.
Hellrigel:
Right. When the History Committee starts meeting in person again, if you become a member, you should have one trip back to Jersey every year because we meet at the Newark Airport hotel for the March meeting.
Cohen:
Oh, okay.
Hellrigel:
Then we meet once year, usually somewhere else. During the pandemic we've been holding monthly or bi-monthly meetings because the IEEE Milestones program is very active. They have been debating the status of including a person’s name in the official citation and putting them on the plaque.
Cohen:
I've seen the milestones. I haven't volunteered to serve on a milestone committee yet, but yes, I know there's a lot of stuff going on with names and locations. IBM Boca had a whole wall on the way to the cafeteria of all the patents. A lot of patents came out of IBM Boca, including the one that was the covering for the original PC.
Hellrigel:
Perhaps potential IEEE Milestones?
Cohen:
Yes. I think that those buildings--IBM Boca has a very, very small presence here now. I do not even know who's in those buildings and I do not know what happened to those patents on the wall. And, just like some of the IEEE Milestones, they want to hang it somewhere that is no longer part of what it is.
Hellrigel:
Exactly. Yes, it's like the Edison Pearl Street site. It's a plaque on this building, and I only came across it because I was walking down to South Street Seaport from the World Trade Center. Now I just tell friends it's across the street, sort of, from McDonald's. Otherwise, you wouldn't notice it.
Cohen:
Yes, and my daughter's working at Nova. She happens to be in the Palm Beach Gardens. She's in a different building now, but she was on what was called RCA Boulevard. It was a big RCA thing here.
Hellrigel:
Oh, I didn't know that.
Cohen:
Yes, yes, in West Palm. There was RCA and there was also--oh, I just read it in one of the books that I was reading. I want to say, it wasn't Westing, I do not know, I can't think of who it was.
Hellrigel:
GE, Westinghouse?
Cohen:
Maybe it was Motorola. Motorola, it was Motorola. There's a Motorola now in Plantation, Florida, but there was a lot of Motorola development work with the original cell phones that was done here in Florida. That is why I am surprised that it's on my to-do list to find out more about what groups are here. Do I want to start something, I do not know. Some days I have the strength, some days I do not.
Hellrigel:
Yes. Maybe it's time for you to put the bug in someone else's ear.
Cohen:
I know, I know. Or maybe if I find somebody else that is willing to do it with me.
Hellrigel:
Right, right, a committee.
Cohen:
Right, right, yes.
Hellrigel:
That is what happened with the founding of the IEEE Life Members group in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. It was a small group of them, and they decided--I guess they got tired of commuting to wherever.
Cohen:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
They had the number, and they're like, we're doing this here.
Cohen:
Right.
Hellrigel:
They meet at lunchtime every so often, and they have speakers come in. I was the inaugural speaker.
Cohen:
Yes. That is the stuff. I do find I have more time now. I can read books that I want to read, not books I am assigned to read. I can read some fiction stuff, not only nonfiction, but you're right I am busy. I am certainly not idle. That is not part of my style. Anyway, all right, so go ahead.
Hellrigel:
I'll let you go, if there's nothing else to add at this point.
Cohen:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
I'll give this digital file from WebEx to Nathan Brewer, and he will send it to the transcription company. I'll get the written transcript back and I will edit it. Then I forward it to you for your edits. Then we can both look we can have a follow-up meeting.
Cohen:
Okay. And how long does it take 'til you get it back?
Hellrigel:
Probably a week, but I have two others to edit before you, because I did--
Cohen:
Okay, got it. No rush.
Hellrigel:
Since you are being trained for the peer-to-peer oral history project I'll send you the transcript before I edit it so that you can see the “raw” product.
You will see what you get as the interviewer.
In preparation for the oral history, you will conduct with John Impagliazzo I will send both of you and email to set up the connection. Then you and John can set a time to record his oral history via either WebEx or Zoom.
Cohen:
I have Zoom. I just signed up for a Webex, so now I do have a Webex account.
Hellrigel:
You could do Webex, too.
Cohen:
Since I am doing the ABET stuff, I have a free Zoom account through ABET for a month. If it's just two of us, Zoom doesn't time you out. It's only if it's more than two.
Hellrigel:
Okay, I didn't know that. When I taught at Stevens Institute of Technology, I used Zoom and IEEE provides Webex. When I gave a lecture for the IEEE Foundation, I used On24, but it is a very expensive platform.
Cohen:
Yes, On24, right, I think is one of the newer ones because I did something that was On24. I've been taking advantage, even some of the IEEE meetings, there's been a few that have extended out via Zoom. I can't tell you off the top of my head, but there's a few different things that I attended. I went to the one about becoming an IEEE Fellow because that was interesting. I just signed up for something that Region 3 is doing, but it's a video, "Women in Skirts" or something. I do not know if that is the title. The big problem with growing older is sometimes I forget words. But anyway, it's a video, and then there's going to be a discussion. They send you a link and you watch the video yourself and then you have a discussion,
Hellrigel:
Yes, you do that. Do you bother with IEEE Collabratec?
Cohen:
I do not. I signed up an account, but I just haven't had a chance to really follow and play with it.
Hellrigel:
Recently, I signed up for an account, but I have not done much with it. The project has been another very expensive adventure for IEEE.
Cohen:
John Day who helps us with the Life Member stuff is a big fan of Collabratec, and the few times I've asked him--sometimes I almost need like a little mini tutorial to get me going.
Hellrigel:
Yes. I keep an eye on it to see what some of the OUs are doing, because I have to write the history of IEEE and that is helpful sometimes. There's so much going on. They also have these things like puzzles and games and trivia questions.
Cohen:
One of the things I guess I should mention, I did go through the IEEE VoLT training last year. Do you know what the VoLT training is?
Hellrigel:
No.
Cohen:
The VoLT, it's the Volunteers and Leadership Training Program, it's called V-O-L-T. They select a bunch of people. It was sort of a six-to-nine-month process. Scott recommended me. I was probably the oldest person that went through VOLT. They had 2021 IEEE President Kathy Land (Susan Kathy Land) speak to us, and a lot of different people from--I keep saying IBM when I want to say IEEE. It gave me a much bigger picture of IEEE, but things are also in silos and fragmented.
Hellrigel:
Oh, yes. The phrase silo is used frequently. We are supposed to break down silos and work across the gaps.
Cohen:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
That is business speak, and in history or whatever it's like, okay, so we got people that do not deal with people outside of their silo. When I stared at the IEEE History Center I created a lunch time lecture series for staff, so break down the silos and meet people outside my immediate office.
Cohen:
Yes, even, I'd say, the stuff with the Life Members Committee. We have two parents. We have the Foundation, and we have MELCC for MGA. Sometimes things are hard for the LMC, it is like they have two parents the MGA and the Foundation. They don’t always agree and sometimes we need to jump through both sets of hoops to get things done. It seems like it is not necessary, it is all IEEE.
Hellrigel:
Yes, and then this Next-Gen accounting system is a big challenge.
Cohen:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
But yes, this lack of going across any kind of divide, I really do not get it. I understand how it happens, but you have to breakdown the silos separating the OUs (Operating Units), etc. I forget the origin, but I do recall hearing a phrase along the line “One IEEE.”
Cohen:
Right.
Hellrigel:
Thank you for your time.
