Oral-History:Nancy Mead

About Nancy Mead

IEEE Life Fellow, Nancy Rose Mead earned a B.A. in mathematics and French (Honors) and an M.S. in mathematics from New York University (NYU), in 1963 and 1967, respectively. Then while working at IBM, she earned a Ph.D. in mathematics from the Polytechnic Institute of New York (now the NYU Tandon School of Engineering) in 1983. Mead was elevated to IEEE Fellow in 2006 in the category Educator “for leadership in software engineering and education.” She is also Fellow (2013) of the Software Education Institute (SEI); a Distinguished Member (2009) of the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM); a Parnas Fellow (2019) at Lero, the Irish Software Research Centre; and the recipient of the 2015 Distinguished Education Award from the IEEE Computer Society’s Technical Community on Software Engineering (IEEE TCSE).

Mead has more than fifty years of experience in software engineering, including software development and management, software engineering education, requirements engineering research, and cyber security research and education. She also specializes in strategic planning for supply chain risk management and critical infrastructure protection. Her research areas are security requirements engineering and software assurance curricula and she co-authored two books, Software Security Engineering (2008) and Cyber Security Engineering (2016) and has more than 150 publications and invited presentations.

Born in Englewood, New Jersey in 1942, Mead grew up in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey in a second-generation Armenian immigrant family., and graduated from Fort Lee High School. Her father Stephen was a photoengraver, and her mother Lucy Pastor, worked in a pencil factory before marriage. Her only sibling, a sister Joan, is four and a half years older, became a nurse and later earned a bachelor’s degree in sociology. Her grandmother had a house in Avon, so like many New Jerseyans, the Meads spent some summer days down the Shore. Reminiscing about her school days, Nancy recalled, “I loved to read. I loved to do any kind of a puzzle. Now, I wasn’t great at arithmetic. Although I obviously I did fine. I never particularly cared for history, for example. That was in grammar school. Once I got into high school, I loved math and all the sciences, and excelled at them. This is probably pretty common among people in STEM careers. I used to do all the problems in the math books just for fun whether or not they were assigned.” Her childhood hobbies included piano, playing trombone in the school band, and especially dance. Indeed, in retirement, she has taken up jazz and tap dancing, and she also plays golf.

During her senior year of high school, Mead received a full tuition scholarship to attend NYU from the NYU Bergen County Alumni Association. She commuted from home, at first to the NYC campus in the Bronx, and worked part-time as a number clerk in a mitten factory. After earning an undergraduate degree in mathematics and French from NYU (1963), Mead took a job as a programmer at Chase Manhattan Bank and simultaneously pursued a master’s degree in mathematics part-time at NYU. She recalled, “I knew nothing about computers. But when I was in school, I met some people who were working in those early days of computing and they encouraged me in that direction and said, oh, this is great. It’s a new field. You will really like it.” Thus, her career in computers, software engineering, and software development took root.

Mead spent a significant portion of her career as a Senior Technical Staff Member at IBM Federal Systems (1966-1990) in the development and management of large real-time systems. She also worked in IBM’s software engineering technology area and managed IBM Federal Systems’ software engineering education department. She has developed and taught numerous courses on software engineering topics, both at universities and in professional education courses. While working at IBM, Mead enrolled in the doctoral program in mathematics at the Polytechnic Institute of New York. In 1983, she graduated after completing her dissertation, "Complexity Measures for System Design," which was supervised by Stanley Preiser.

After leaving IBM, she spent nearly three decades (1990-2018) at the Software Engineering Institute and Carnegie Mellon University, as Principial Research and SEI Fellow (2013). At SEI her research and teach focused on software and security requirements engineering and the development of software engineering and software assurance curricula. She also served as Director Software Education for the SEI from 1991 to 1994. Since June 2018, Mead has been a Fellow (ret.) at SEI, an Adjunct Professor of Software Engineering (remote) at Carnegie Mellon University, and an independent software security consultant.

Mead is an active volunteer and member of the IEEE Computer Society, the IEEE Reliability Society, IEEE Women in Engineering, ACM, and SEI. As a Distinguished Speaker for the IEEE Computer Society (2020-2022) Mead’s presentations included ““Threat Modeling Research and Machine Learning,” “Using Malware Analysis to Identify Overlooked Security Requirements,” and “Lessons Learned from an Industry/Government/Academic Collaboration in Educating Secure Software Developers.” She has served on the editorial boards for the International Journal of Systems and Software Security and Protection and the Requirements Engineering Journal and as a member the IEEE TCSE Executive Committee and the Open University Advisory Board. Since 2010, the Nancy Mead Award for Excellence in Software Engineering Education has been awarded by the IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering Education and Training (CSEE&T). It is named in honor of Mead, the founding Steering Committee Chair of the Conference on Software Engineering Education and Training.

About the Interview

NANCY MEAD: An Interview Conducted by Mary Ann Hellrigel, IEEE History Center, March 29, 2024, and April 19, 2024

Interview #907 for the IEEE History Center, The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc.

Copyright Statement

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It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows:

Nancy Mead, an oral history conducted in 2024 by Mary Ann Hellrigel, IEEE History Center, Piscataway, NJ, USA.

Interview

INTERVIEWEE: Nancy Mead

INTERVIEWER: Mary Ann Hellrigel

DATE: 29 March 2024 and 19 April, 2024

PLACE: Virtual

Early life and education

Hellrigel:

[0:00:00] Today is March 29, 2024. This is Mary Ann Hellrigel. I'm the Institutional Historian. Archivist, and Oral History Program Manager at the IEEE History Center. I'm with Dr. Nancy Mead who’s a [0:00:20] 2006 Fellow of IEEE, now a Life Fellow. We’re recording this via Webex. I welcome you and I truly appreciate you taking the time.

Mead:

Oh, thanks, it’s an honor to be here.

Hellrigel:

What I’d like to start with is if you could tell me your full [0:00:40] name and then if you feel comfortable, where you were born and maybe the year. Whatever you feel comfortable with, so we start with your family roots.

Mead:

Okay, great. My name is Nancy Mead. My middle name is Rose. It’s Nancy [0:01:00] Rose Mead although I don’t really use my middle name. As a child, my name was Gardiner which is a pretty common British-sounding name. But my family is Armenian. My parents [0:01:20] were second generation Armenian. I was born in Englewood, New Jersey. The New York area was a pretty common area for Armenians to settle along with some other cities. When they came [0:01:40] here, my grandfather was a shoemaker. His son was in the same trade. He was newly married. That was on my mother’s side. My mother’s [0:02:00] parents died when she was a year old from tuberculosis. It was very sad, but again, pretty common in those days so she grew up with her grandfather. He had a relatively younger family with a second wife. She [my mother] [0:02:20] had no direct siblings. On my father’s side he lived in Brooklyn as a child. My grandmother came over from Turkey when she was eight years old. Married another Armenian. This was kind [0:02:40] of a scandal. They got divorced, which was unheard of in that early part of the twentieth century. He also grew up as an only child.

Hellrigel:

Wow.

Mead:

We had a really small family. There were some [0:03:00] cousins. Then in my immediate family was me and my sister. My sister was four and a half years older than me. In certain regards I was almost like an only child because we weren’t anywhere near in the [0:03:20] same place in our education. We didn’t have the same friends.

Hellrigel:

Different school cohorts. You wouldn’t have been in high school together, barely in grammar school together. You were born in Englewood. Did you grow up in Englewood?

Mead:

Englewood Cliffs. Which at the time [0:03:40] was a small town. While I was growing up it ranged from maybe 700 to 900 people, much smaller than it is now.

Hellrigel:

Oh.

Mead:

My grammar school class was eight students.

Hellrigel:

Wow. That is small.

Mead:

We had two classes [0:04:00] together with a single teacher.

Hellrigel:

Then you graduated from Englewood Cliffs High School?

Mead:

No, it was Englewood Cliffs Grammar School. My high school was Fort Lee High.

Hellrigel:

More of a regional that the Englewood Cliffs students went to because there were too [0:04:20] few to run their own high school.

Mead:

Right, we would have either gone to Englewood or Fort Lee.

Hellrigel:

What was your mother’s name if you don’t mind?

Mead:

Her name was Lucy Pastor. The names, the Armenian names were all [0:04:40] translated. Pastor was the translation of Papazian. They were professions. Papa was indicating that there was a priest in the family and of course in the Orthodox religions the priests could get [0:05:00] married. She became Pastor and my father’s family which has a much longer name became Gardner.

Hellrigel:

His first name?

Mead:

Stephen. The names were American names. In that timeframe, [0:05:20] everybody wanted to be 100 percent American.

Hellrigel:

Some of your ancestors may have come over after World War I, after the genocide?

Mead:

My immediate family came over before. Things weren’t great, but they were okay. [0:05:40] We knew people who came over after and they all had family stories about the things that happened. A lot of them didn’t come directly to the United States. They immigrated to other countries first maybe to Lebanon [0:06:00] or possibly some place in Europe, and then came here. A lot of them did come by way of the Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island.

Hellrigel:

I don’t know about Brooklyn, but Bergen County, New Jersey still has a large Armenian population. They even have the [0:06:20] monument to the victims of the genocide.

Mead:

Yes. California was the other big destination and when I lived in Massachusetts, the Boston area, also had a big enclave so it’s interesting.

Hellrigel:

What did your [0:06:40] father do for a living? He was a shoemaker?

Mead:

No, he was a photoengraver. He worked in lithography. What he did exactly was to work with the big copper plates that were used in magazines like [0:07:00] Life and Look Magazine. He had a skill that only two people in his company did. His job was a router. What routers did was to [0:07:20] remove the part of the plate that was not going to be inked so that that inked part would stand out.

Hellrigel:

Okay, he cut the metal.

Mead:

What he was able to do was what they called patchwork which meant that if somebody made a mistake and cut out too [0:07:40] much, rather than having to scrap the entire plate, he had the skill to be able to put the piece back in.

Hellrigel:

He had the artistic skills and also metalworking skills.

Mead:

Yes. He was an amateur photographer.

Hellrigel:

Wow. [0:08:00] He grew up in Brooklyn. What was his level of education?

Mead:

Neither of my parents finished high school. In his case, in my understanding, in his case it was because he was a spoiled only [0:08:20] child and did exactly what he wanted to do.

Hellrigel:

He had an independent streak.

Mead:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

[Laughing].

Mead:

When he was fifteen or sixteen, he and one of his buddies took off from school and hitchhiked to Chicago.

Hellrigel:

Oh, wow.

Mead:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

[0:08:40] Oh, that is troublesome.

Mead:

Right. Now on my mother’s side, she quit high school because there was no money, and she went to work. That was that. According to her account, [0:09:00] she worked in a pencil factory until she met my dad and got married.

Hellrigel:

When he hitchhiked back to Brooklyn from Chicago [Laughing].

Mead:

[Laughing] Well, he wrote -- he was very enterprising. Apparently, he was wearing [0:09:20] Thom McAn shoes. He wrote a letter about how he had hitchhiked to Chicago with those shoes, and they held up for the trip. He got a letter back from the shoe company along with a free pair of shoes.

Hellrigel:

Yes, I remember Thom McAn’s. They were [0:09:40] a chain store. I imagine they liked that because it pointed out their quality and durability. Those shoes were not made by hand by a shoemaker, and they were still good enough.

Mead:

Right.

Hellrigel:

Then your parents met in Brooklyn.

Mead:

[0:10:00] It was pretty common for Armenians, almost any immigrant group, to be introduced to one another by older relatives, parents, friends, whatever. I don’t remember exactly who introduced them. [0:10:20] But yes, they met. They didn’t live that far apart. I imagine that, from what I know, their dating was mostly in the New York area. My dad was a big baseball fan, so they went to ball games and they [0:10:40] went to the beach even though he didn’t swim.

Hellrigel:

Outings to Coney Island? The amusements and beach.

Mead:

Yes. But I don’t think that was a big destination for them. I'm not sure. They might have gone to Rockaway or the beaches on [0:11:00] Long Island.

Hellrigel:

They then marry and move to New Jersey?

Mead:

Yes. In fact, the house where I grew up actually belonged to my grandmother. For a while we lived with her. Then she built another [0:11:20] house down near the Jersey shore and then the house was ours, but it was kind of a tumbled down place. It was pretty old by the time we were growing up and got even older.

Hellrigel:

This is [0:11:40] your mother’s mother or your father’s?

Mead:

No, my dad’s mother.

Hellrigel:

As the only, child he would inherit it anyway.

Mead:

Exactly. But I don’t know, I guess everybody has quirks. At that point, we [0:12:00] didn't know that he rented it from her. When he wanted to buy it at one point, she told him that she wanted cash.

Hellrigel:

Oh, gosh.

Mead:

She was tough.

Hellrigel:

Wow, she was tough. If she had a place down at the shore, then you could visit? [0:12:20]

Mead:

We went in the summer because there was no air conditioning. In that timeframe, you wanted to get to a different place. We would go down there and then what he would do is he would stay home during the week because he was working and then come down on the weekends.

Hellrigel:

[0:12:40] Whereabouts down the shore?

Mead:

She was in Avon which is part of Neptune.

Hellrigel:

Yes, so not too far south.

Mead:

No, but part of it was before the [New Jersey] Turnpike was built.

Hellrigel:

Right, yes.

Mead:

[0:13:00] Let alone the [Garden State] Parkway. It was about a two-hour drive.

Hellrigel:

Yes, because you’d have to take Route 1, Route 9, and the old state roads.

Mead:

Route 9, yes, Route 1.

Hellrigel:

Route 9. That’s right. Yes, 9 and 1. Wow.

When you were growing up what subjects did you like in school? [0:13:20]

Mead:

I loved to read. I loved to do any kind of a puzzle. Now, I wasn’t great at arithmetic. Although I [0:13:40] obviously I did fine.

Hellrigel:

[Laughing].

Mead:

I never particularly cared for history, for example. That was in grammar school. Once I got into high school, I loved math and all the sciences, [0:14:00] and excelled at them. This is probably pretty common among people in STEM careers. I used to do all the problems in the math books just for fun whether or not they were assigned.

Hellrigel:

You were a diligent mathematician in high school.

Mead:

Yes. [0:14:20].

Hellrigel:

What were your aspirations or what did your folks expect of you?

Mead:

It wasn’t a lot of thought there and about [0:14:40] careers. I thought about being a teacher. Later on, I thought about going to college. I think I was probably in high school before I got serious about that because [0:15:00] most of their friends, the fathers worked, the mothers stayed home. Typically, the fathers were not doctors, lawyers or college professors. They were working in blue collar jobs, [0:15:20] the same as my father.

Hellrigel:

Your mother, once she got married and started to have the children, she stayed at home.

Mead:

Yes, my sister came along immediately, so that was the end of that.

Hellrigel:

Your sister’s name if you don’t mind?

Mead:

Joan. [0:15:40] Her middle name was Anna. We both have middle names that came from grandparents.

Hellrigel:

Joan’s four and a half years ahead of you. Did she go to college or secretarial school or…? [0:16:00]

Mead:

Well, she was considered to be the smart one in the family, but she didn’t want to work hard. One of her high school friends once told me that when Joan was in high school, they were in the orchestra and [0:16:20] Joan was playing piano, doing music arrangements, and doing her homework all at the same time.

Hellrigel:

Multitasker.

Mead:

Yes. She never worked very hard, but she was bright. Originally, she had [0:16:40] thoughts about medicine and she wanted to be a pathologist. When she found out how much work that would be, and then considering the finances she ended up in nurses’ training. She became a nurse and later on got a bachelor’s [0:17:00] degree in sociology. At that point, working part time with kids, she did alcohol and drug abuse programs in the high schools in her county and arranged for [0:17:20] guest speakers and all that kind of thing.

Hellrigel:

Wow. She was people oriented then. Sociology and outreach. She stayed in New Jersey?

Mead:

Yes. In fact, they ended up [0:17:40] living in Middletown not too far from where my grandmother was.

Hellrigel:

When you’re growing up, do you have any hobbies or interests? She played the piano. What were you up to?

Mead:

I played piano as well [0:18:00] but I wasn’t good at it and after a while I didn’t want to put the effort into things that I wasn’t good at. I started to take dance lessons. Which was kind of a big deal because the dance studio [0:18:20] was two bus rides. My mother would go with me after school one day a week. We did ballet and tap, and I loved that. Piano, I didn't care for it as much and after my sister finished [0:18:40] high school, she quit the piano lessons and I was allowed to quit, too. Dance at that time was my big hobby.

Hellrigel:

Two bus rides from Englewood would take you where?

Mead:

Cliffside.

Hellrigel:

Cliffside, along the Hudson River. [0:19:00] You did this throughout grammar school and high school?

Mead:

I might have started when I was around ten and I did it through high school.

Hellrigel:

Did you have any clubs you were a [0:19:20] member of in high school or after school activities?

Mead:

I also played in the band and the orchestra. But in a smaller high school, you didn’t always get to pick what instrument you could play. All the kids wanted to play trumpet and [0:19:40] clarinet. It ended up that one of my choices was trombone. I took trombone and we would take lessons at school and then play with the band which was the same as the [0:20:00] orchestra. It’s not obvious right now as we’re talking, but my maximum height as a kid was 5’2” playing the trombone and being able to reach all the way out to the seventh position [0:20:20] was not easy.

Hellrigel:

That’s tough.

Mead:

[Laughing] Then in the natural course of things as a senior I became first trombone. I loved music, but that wasn’t really where my talent was. My real talent from a [0:20:40] hobby perspective was in dance which I still do by the way.

Hellrigel:

Oh. What type of dance? Ballroom?

Mead:

No, I do jazz and tap dance.

Hellrigel:

Oh, okay. I didn’t know if you segued to ballroom dancing and all that.

Mead:

Yes, [0:21:00] I could easily enough. The problem with ballroom dancing: unless you’re taking private lessons or in a competition, if you’re doing a group class for somebody like me it’s really slow. [0:21:20]

Hellrigel:

My aunt and her late husband used to belong to ballroom dance clubs on the outskirts of Boston. They used to go on Friday and Saturday nights and maybe during the week, to different venues that had ballroom dancing. It was an organized event with a live band, pizza, vino, and snacks. [0:21:40]

Mead:

For a while, I lived some place where they did square-dancing. I have friends in Ireland. The one friend’s assistant was in the [0:22:00] cast for River Dance, so she tried to show me a few things, but I learned that that type of dance is totally different from any training that I had.

Hellrigel:

Interesting. Right, now you just go to a studio and do this, and you have lessons?

Mead:

Yes. I have a [0:22:20] wonderful instructor, yes.

Hellrigel:

Oh, okay. Now you also play golf.

Mead:

Yes. My husband and I, when he was with me, we took that up at the same time. He was very athletic. He became [0:22:40] a pretty good player. His mother used to say that he liked anything that involved a ball. The golf ball became his passion and that was something that we did together and that I still do although it’s not as much of a priority for me [0:23:00] as it was for him.

Hellrigel:

I think you mentioned that your father was a baseball fan. Did that rub off on you?

Mead:

Oh, yes. He loved the Brooklyn Dodgers. My sister and I used to go together when, oh, I was probably in my early teens. [0:23:20] So we would go --

Hellrigel:

They moved.

Mead:

Yes. From our house, we would take the bus into New York, take the subway into Brooklyn and then you had to take the elevated train to get to Ebbets Field. Which was the [0:23:40] same as the train that went to Coney Island. It was always crowded.

Hellrigel:

Oh, yes, they played at Ebbets Field before moving to Los Angeles.

Mead:

Typically, we were in school, so we were going on a Saturday.

Hellrigel:

Right, and when the Brooklyn Dodgers moved to California did your father become a Mets fan?

Mead:

Yes. [0:24:00] Anything but the Yankees.

Hellrigel:

Yes, I didn’t want to ask it that way.

Mead:

[Laughing]

Hellrigel:

Then did he follow football?

Mead:

Yes, he followed football sometimes. It kind of didn't matter what sport it was. In the early [0:24:20] days of television he would have on one game on the TV and another game on the radio.

Hellrigel:

Wow. He had both inventions running simultaneously in his house.

Mead:

Oh, very early. We had a TV from around -- remember in the [0:24:40] New York area we had it early. We had our first TV around 1950. We had our first TV around 1950.

Hellrigel:

Yes, that is early.

Mead:

One of my friends had one in 1948, I think, and her family had one with a magnifier. [0:25:00]

Hellrigel:

Oh, yes, because it popped up, it was a little screen and image.

Mead:

Right. Exactly. My parents told me that they had actually seen closed-circuit TV before World War II.

Hellrigel:

Oh, maybe at the World’s Fair, too. I bet that they were demonstrating [0:25:20] it around the New York area but it was actually at the World’s Fair in 1939 in New York.

Mead:

It was in the New York area. I don’t know if it was at the fair or not. Then of course with the war all of that slowed down [0:25:40] until afterwards.

Hellrigel:

Yes, because a lot of those companies shifted to sonar or radar work. Then commercial development was delayed. They weren’t manufacturing TVs during World War II. Anyway, what else about TV at your house?

Mead:

We had an early TV. It was tubes and [0:26:00] analog controls. My dad would spend hours trying to tune the test pattern so that it looked perfect. He’s behind the TV and since nobody could stand in the front of the TV for [0:26:20] hours on end, he would prop up a mirror on a chair so that he could see the TV while he was working in the back.

Hellrigel:

Wow, that’s dedication. He watched sports. Any other shows you remember?

Mead:

As kids we used to watch cartoon [0:26:40] shows. There was the equivalent of PBS. PBS was Channel 13, and they had a cartoon show and then immediately after that was Howdy Doody. My sister and I were actually, one time, in the peanut gallery.

Hellrigel:

Oh, [0:27:00] okay, so you went to New York City. I'm from the New York City area and when I was growing up, in addition to the major national broadcasters, we had the local channels. Channel 11 was WPIX, WOR would have been Channel 9, and WNEW was Channel 5. Channel 5 had a Sunday morning children’s show called Wonderama. Another children’s show was [0:27:20] Soupy Sales.

Mead:

Soupy Sales I think was a little bit later.

Hellrigel:

Yes. The cartoons and the sports and then they maybe had variety shows.

Mead:

Sure, we had Milton Berle was on [0:27:40] then Sid Caesar. I think that was called Show of Shows. We had Ed Sullivan and then later on Jackie Gleason.

Hellrigel:

Your family was a TV family.

Mead:

Very much. [0:28:00] The TV set was in the dining room. [Laughing].

Hellrigel:

Oh, so then you didn’t have to break from supper or Sunday dinner.

Mead:

I think we had some of the first TV dinners, too. They weren’t very good, but we [0:28:20] tried everything.

Hellrigel:

Oh, Swanson [TV dinners] I think came out in the mid-1950s.

Mead:

That’s exactly what it was.

Hellrigel:

Yes. The brownie was like a little brick, but you had your protein, your mashed potato and your dessert, and maybe two vegetables. Personally, I don’t know about the earliest versions, but I do recall one uncle eating them in the 1960s and early 1970s.

Mead:

I can’t remember. [0:28:40] I remember the mashed potatoes distinctly.

Hellrigel:

[Laughing].

Mead:

Maybe it was a chicken or a meatloaf or something.

Hellrigel:

Yes. They all looked little bricks. They weren’t very palatable, but they were a treat.

Mead:

Yes, it was a change.

Hellrigel:

Yes. You’re growing up in the [0:29:00] area, you have some interest in STEM, and you have some hobbies. Did you have any part-time jobs growing up and during high school?

Mead:

I didn’t have any in high school because we really had no opportunity then. We had only one car. [0:29:20] I didn’t drive at that point in time. It would have been difficult. I had a part-time job in college working for a mitten manufacturer in the office. What I did was when an order [0:29:40] came in, each company wanted something a little bit different. For example, JC Penney got one specific assortment. Woolworth’s got another one. Saks and other high-end stores had their own [0:30:00] fabric, so they had special orders. What I would do is take the incoming order, break it down into the sizes and colors that went to that customer, and then that would go to the warehouse for shipping. After the first [0:30:20] week, by then I'm in college, and I'm majoring in math, so at the end of the first week I had already memorized the assortments. There was no need to use a calculator, which would have been a giant machine anyway. I just did it in my [0:30:40] head.

At the end of the season, the first year that I was there, one of the managers showed me how he did inventory. Of course, this was all done by hand. He did inventory to figure out how much they would need to make the next year. [0:31:00] He showed me how to do that and then the next year I did it by myself. It was good because it actually fit my skillset. I had learned to type, but I wasn’t the world’s best typist. Getting a secretarial job would have been more of a [0:31:20] challenge, but this number clerk job was perfect for me.

Hellrigel:

In high school you’re taking college prep, but typing was secretarial?

Mead:

That was an elective. Typing was an elective. Actually, [0:31:40] considering the use of computers, I'm very glad I had the chance to do that. My mother, even though she didn’t have a lot of education, had one rule, and that was that in high school we were to have no free study periods.

Hellrigel:

Ah. [0:32:00]

Mead:

Every school period had to have a subject. Mine would have been band. I was in the chorus. There was a typing class. Of course, we all had to take gym.

Hellrigel:

Right. [0:32:20]

Mead:

Then, yes, pretty much what was called the academic curriculum that was college prep. But we didn’t, unlike today, in the average school, you didn’t take the equivalent of AP courses. We didn’t take [0:32:40] calculus. The math was two years of algebra, geometry, and then the senior year was trigonometry. And solid geometry.

Hellrigel:

Then you took biology, chemistry, and physics.

Mead:

Exactly. [0:33:00] We went there for four years, not just the three, and the first year was general science.

Hellrigel:

Then by state law you had to have English and social studies every year.

Mead:

Exactly.

Hellrigel:

That fills out your dance card. [0:33:20] You said maybe in tenth grade you decided college was your direction? While in high school you decided that you were going to go to college.

Mead:

Actually, it was going into ninth grade, more or less, when we had to make that choice. I had [0:33:40] not thought about it. All my parents knew was that I should do that because if I decided I wanted to do something else, that was no problem, but if I wanted to go to college, I would have the right preparation. They had [0:34:00] exactly one friend, as I recall, who was actually a college graduate, and he was very helpful. He was an engineer.

Hellrigel:

Then you had some guidance. Then if your sister went to nursing school, at that point, it was probably [0:34:20] associated with a hospital?

Mead:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

But she still needed to -- back then you calculated math and science, you had to calculate the drug.

Mead:

Oh, she did the academic program, too. We both did. My mother actually had a cousin who was a [0:34:40] doctor. He helped her. For me, huh, when I took biology, they had a few classes where they did dissections. I got sick and had to go to the nurse’s office. I knew that medicine was not for me. Even though I did really [0:35:00] well in biology from an intellectual viewpoint, I knew that medicine was not for me. [Laughing].

Hellrigel:

Yes, I could see. I remember the earthworm and then we got up to the fish.

Mead:

Well, we had a frog.

Hellrigel:

Oh, yes, we had earthworm, frog, and then a fish.

Mead:

I think [0:35:20] I was there for the earthworm, for the second one, whatever it was. I was sick that day, which was fine with me. Then when it got to the frog, that’s when I went to the nurse’s office [Laughing].

Hellrigel:

Yes, well, at least you knew what you didn’t want to do, which is important. [0:35:40]

Mead:

Yes. In the end, I got As in all those courses. We didn’t have an idea of plus or minus or 4.0, et cetera, it was just straight letter grades. [0:36:00] It’s an interesting history. Rensselaer provided an achievement medal to high school students recognizing the best math and science students over the course of the [0:36:20] number of years. I didn’t even know it existed, but I won the award.

Hellrigel:

Wow. Your folks must have been very happy, as were you.

Mead:

Oh, my dad used to bring it out to brag to people [Laughing] about how smart I was and of course [0:36:40] I was mortified.

Hellrigel:

It was probably a little medal?

Mead:

Yes, I still have it.

Hellrigel:

Oh, that’s what I was going to ask.

Mead:

Yes. I could actually retrieve it if you wanted it included in this.

Hellrigel:

Yes, maybe we could take a photo with you in it. If you want to take a [0:37:00] photo of it, you could do a photo with your medal. Whatever works for you but that would be cool.

Mead:

Okay. I'll do that. It’s small. You know, it’s about this big.

Hellrigel:

Yes, we could --

Mead:

Yes, I still have that. I don’t have all of those little artifacts. I don’t remember if I still have the [0:37:20] Honor Society Pin. But I do have that one.

Hellrigel:

You made the National Honor Society. Then you got this award. Any other awards in high school?

NYU

Mead:

No. The big thing that I got was a full tuition scholarship to NYU. [0:37:40]

Hellrigel:

How did that come about?

Mead:

The friend who was an engineer had gone to NYU. We didn’t have a lot of money. You know even filing an application for college was an expense. [0:38:00] The idea was I would live at home because spending money on, what, residence and food and all of that was pretty much out of the question. I applied to two schools. One was Rutgers which would have been Douglass [0:38:20] College at that time. The other was NYU, in part thanks to the friend’s influence. At that time, they had a campus in the Bronx that was engineering and arts and science. The year that I [0:38:40] started, I'll come back to this, but the year that I started was the first year that that uptown school admitted girls. There were about 100 of us among 3,000 students. The scholarship that I got was given by the Bergen [0:39:00] County Alumni Association. I got into Rutgers, but I didn’t get a scholarship there so that was the decision. I lived at home and commuted for the four years.

Hellrigel:

[0:39:20] It was up to the Bronx.

Mead:

Yes. That was three buses [Laughing].

Hellrigel:

Three buses up and over the G. W. Bridge (George Washington Bridge)?

Mead:

The G. W. and then one in Manhattan. I'm trying to think where we changed. I think we changed between Manhattan [0:39:40] and the Bronx. The third bus was to the university. Sometimes I could catch a ride. There were a couple of other students who had gotten similarly advanced scholarships, but they had gotten in because their fathers were in the electricians’ union. They had [0:40:00] gotten union scholarships. To go to NYU. Sometimes I could catch a ride with them which would save me the bus fare. So, I got a $5 a week allowance.

Hellrigel:

That’s to pay for the transportation.

Mead:

The bus fare was $3.50 which left me [0:40:20] $1.50 for lunch for the week.

Hellrigel:

Did you bring your lunch or were you able to buy it?

Mead:

Sometimes I brought my lunch. Lots of times I would get a Kaiser roll and a cup of coffee which was twenty cents. A big treat would have been an [0:40:40] egg salad sandwich. Then if I wanted something extra, like an ice cream, I would skip one of the buses and walk.

Hellrigel:

Wow, but you were on a mission to graduate so that --

Mead:

Absolutely. The mission [0:41:00] was -- in that timeframe you know you basically had two choices. You either got married to somebody who could support you or you worked.

Hellrigel:

Right.

Mead:

By then I knew that whether or not I got married, I wanted to be able to support [0:41:20] myself. A better way of doing it in terms of a career was to go to college. Even though I hadn’t really formulated exactly what I was going to do when I finished.

Hellrigel:

You’re going to go to NYU. How did you decide on [0:41:40] what your major would be?

Mead:

In high school I really liked both math and chemistry. But when I thought it over, I realized that I hadn’t had as much [0:42:00] exposure to chemistry. I wasn’t sure if I would like it as much as math. The first year or two, the coursework was not that different between majors. So, I quickly decided [0:42:20] that in the first-year calculus, basically, I decided that was it.

Hellrigel:

You’re going to major in math. You have this job at the mitten factory. That’s back in New Jersey?

Mead:

Yes. That didn't start that first year. That was a little bit [0:42:40] later. The other thing that happened, unexpectedly, was a language requirement, because keeping in mind I was in the arts and sciences college not in the engineering college, there was a language requirement. I started [0:43:00] taking French. I realized that I really liked it and so I wanted to do a double major which was a little bit unusual. That meant by the end of the second year, since I hadn’t taken French in [0:43:20] high school, I had to take the third year of French over the summer. Then I could take the more advanced course, the literature courses, in my junior and senior year. I approached the department head and he said, well, if the dean approves this double major it’s [0:43:40] okay with me. I went to the dean’s office. He said, well, if the department head approves it, it’s okay with me.

Hellrigel:

It was approved.

Mead:

It was approved because I told both of them that the other one had already approved it.

Hellrigel:

That worked.

Mead:

Yes. My [0:44:00] junior and senior year basically all I took were math courses and French courses.

Hellrigel:

Math and French. What language did you take in high school?

Mead:

In high school, I did two years of Spanish.

Hellrigel:

But then why switch to French? You could have taken Spanish?

Mead:

I could [0:44:20] have. I don’t know, it just didn’t…

Hellrigel:

Didn’t grab you?

Mead:

It didn’t resonate with me. Maybe in part because in high school, it was just memorization. It wasn’t as interesting.

Hellrigel:

[0:44:40] When you’re an undergraduate are there any mentors or any influential professors?

Mead:

I would say that among those that were influential, [0:45:00] the first two years, I had the same math professor. He was quite good and then he taught some of the third-year courses, too. On the French side, there was a female [0:45:20] professor who I would say was a mentor. Then the third and fourth year in French, they had started a TV series called Sunrise Semester. I'm pretty sure it was on [0:45:40] PBS. The professor teaching French in that TV series was one of my professors, so he was very influential on that side. I would say it was those two and then when I got [0:46:00] to in the third year, I got to advanced calculus. You don’t think of math as being aesthetically pleasing but it was to me.

Hellrigel:

[Laughing].

Mead:

It was [0:46:20] kind of the beauty of how the higher levels of mathematics all actually related to one another once you understood that. You didn’t necessarily see it in early math: it was more like solving puzzles, once again. But in the [0:46:40] later courses you could really see how abstract math and applied math eventually came together at the top and complemented one another. That’s when I knew that I wanted to do graduate work in math and not in French.

Hellrigel:

But you’re going to [0:47:00] stick with the French anyway.

Mead:

Oh, I did. In fact, I did an honors program in French.

Hellrigel:

Did you travel abroad?

Mead:

Oh, no, there was no money for that [Laughing].

Hellrigel:

I just thought I’d ask.

Mead:

Not in that timeframe. I didn’t travel abroad until I started working and could [0:47:20] pay for it myself.

Hellrigel:

You’re going to graduate college. I guess in your third year you decide you want to go to grad school.

Mead:

What I was doing, this kind of, again, fit my mother’s philosophy. [0:47:40] I was taking the maximum number of credits I was allowed to take with the scholarship. As a consequence, I could have graduated early, but instead, I started talking graduate level math courses [0:48:00] along with my other requirements that I was trying to complete. By the second semester of my senior year, I was actually taking classes at NYU’s Courant Institute.

Hellrigel:

The NYU what kind of institute?

Mead:

It’s called the [0:48:20] Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences. It’s named for Richard Courant who founded the school. That’s within NYU, of course. That was down in Washington Square.

Hellrigel:

That’s what I was going to say. You had to go down to 4th Street on the subway. [0:48:40]

Mead:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

That meant a lot of commuting.

Mead:

Well.

Hellrigel:

You made the segue there. You were just down in the Greenwich Village area?

Mead:

No, I was still taking classes uptown.

Hellrigel:

You would have a long day then. You hop the [0:49:00] bus and you would spend the whole day in the city?

Mead:

I think the math classes were actually evening classes, so, yes, it was long.

Hellrigel:

You were taking the bus. What did you do in the [0:49:20] summertime between semesters? Between the years?

Mead:

Between the sophomore and junior year I had that extra French course that I had to take. Then the part-time job became a full-time job in the summer. [0:49:40]

Hellrigel:

How did you find this part-time job? Mittens.

Mead:

The mitten manufacturer? [Laughing] They had a newspaper ad. It was a classified ad. Initially, they were looking for secretarial which I didn’t get that [0:50:00] job, but then a few weeks later they called me back for this number clerk job that hadn’t even been advertised.

Hellrigel:

They were impressed.

Mead:

With that part anyway.

Hellrigel:

Do you remember your starting salary? [0:50:20]

Mead:

I think it was something like $70 a week. That was a lot of money. That was the full-time salary. That was a lot of money.

Hellrigel:

Right. You’re talking almost maybe $1.40 an hour. [0:50:40]

Mead:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

Which would have been above minimum wage. So, you were pretty happy with that. Did you think of any other part-time jobs?

Mead:

No, the only other ones were in department stores.

Hellrigel:

Yes, sales?

Mead:

Once in a [0:51:00] while they’d hire extra people to do an inventory, that kind of thing. It was really mechanical.

Hellrigel:

This one, the mitten manufacturer, I guess your seasons matched with their [0:51:20] seasons because they would do a lot of the production in the summer to get ready for the fall and winter seasons.

Mead:

Virtually all the orders would be done during the summer. By September they were done because anything that stores wanted for [0:51:40] Christmas would have to be shipped by then. Then after Christmas, nobody would be ordering anything for after Christmas. They’d be selling off whatever they still had.

Hellrigel:

Right. Yes. The discount sales to clear out the inventory.

Mead:

Exactly. Then the [0:52:00] company, if they were doing anything in the winter, it would be manufacturing, and they actually had a couple of engineers who did their designs. They had a machine shop. They would produce [0:52:20] just the really small number to see how they held up, et cetera.

Hellrigel:

Did you like these mittens? Did you wear them?

Mead:

Oh, well, sure. The first reason was that they were free. Secondly [0:52:40] they had several lines. One was kind of a plastic. Then they had nylon ones. They had gloves, too, but the ones I liked the best, they had nylon mittens and they had a [0:53:00] little strap that went around the wrist that you could tighten.

Hellrigel:

Oh, to keep them on.

Mead:

So that the snow didn’t get into your mittens.

Hellrigel:

That would make sense. You had a chilly commute in the winter.

Mead:

Well, certainly any walking would have been. [0:53:20] For school there would have been walking to and from the bus stop, not to mention waiting outside for the bus.

Hellrigel:

Right. You’re going to go to graduate school then. It really rolled right into it. Did you have to apply, or you just were…? [0:53:40]

Mead:

I can’t remember if I had to apply or if it was an automatic acceptance. I’m sure I had to apply.

Hellrigel:

You probably had to, to get the advanced [0:54:00] program, then you bridge over.

Mead:

Yes. One that you had to apply for. Then I was working because at first I didn’t have any scholarships at the graduate level. [0:54:20] Working and going part time. The part-time program and the full-time program were different. If I had wanted to go -- I could have gone full time. But the grad school in math [0:54:40] had 600 students altogether. Only 200 of them were full-time. The full-time day program was basically Ph.D. students who were studying theoretical math. At that point, I was trying to [0:55:00] get a master’s degree in applied math. I was taking evening classes. I had to take fewer of them because of the work that I had from the credits that I already had from taking those [0:55:20] courses as an undergrad. Since I had started working, I got tuition refunds that helped a lot

Hellrigel:

From the mitten company or you had a different --

Mead:

Oh, no, by then I had a real job.

Chase Manhattan Bank, Master's degree

Hellrigel:

What’s your real job?

Mead:

My first job was as a programmer [0:55:40] with Chase Manhattan Bank. I knew nothing about computers. I do remember how I decided to do that. When I started looking for a job there was a [0:56:00] choice of actuarial trainee positions. There were math librarians and statisticians. Then there was programming which I knew nothing about. But [0:56:20] when I was in school, I met some people who were working in those early days of computing and they encouraged me in that direction and said, oh, this is great. It’s a new field. You will really like it.

Hellrigel:

Oh.

Mead:

I told people this before but [0:56:40] one of the things that I learned in the course of doing that was that in the New York Times which was where you had the classified ads for those professional positions, it was Help Wanted Male and Help Wanted Female in separate sections of the newspaper. [0:57:00] I wasted at least a month looking in the Help Wanted Female section when all the ads in math and computing were in the Help Wanted Male section.

Hellrigel:

Oh, boy. [0:57:20] How did you feel when you figured that out?

Mead:

Of course, I was disappointed that I’d missed that many opportunities. Then it was the kind of the unknown of [0:57:40] applying for jobs where you weren’t sure if they really wanted you.

Hellrigel:

Because it said male.

Mead:

Right.

Hellrigel:

Did NYU have any kind of placement office or anybody to help?

Mead:

[Long pause]

Hellrigel:

Probably not.

Mead:

Not that I [0:58:00] recall. In that timeframe I have no recollection anything of that nature.

Hellrigel:

Yes. How did the interview go then if it was in the Male Section?

Mead:

The interviews were [0:58:20] okay. There wasn’t any, what I would call, outright discrimination during the interview processes.

Hellrigel:

But there were [0:58:40] probably pay differentials but you wouldn’t have known that.

Mead:

Right. [Pause] The more bias, more obvious bias, occurred actually which was [0:59:00] later on after I had been working for a while when I started the Ph.D. program. By then I was at Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute which was a good fit because it was a smaller [0:59:20] school. Fewer students, more personal attention. There was one other woman in the math Ph.D. program. We had teaching [0:59:40] assistantships which was good because that was the only way I could do it. I had taken a leave of absence from work. She and I were the only ones among the teaching assistants who had to share a desk.

Hellrigel:

Oh, gosh.

Mead:

All the guys who were teaching [1:00:00] assistants had their own desk. We didn’t have private offices by any means but at least they had their own desks. We didn’t even have that. In the classes, I’ve told any number of people about this, we were in an old manufacturing building that had been converted to [1:00:20] classrooms. It’s kind of like in Hidden Figures. They had men’s restrooms on every floor, but the women’s restrooms were only on every other floor.

Hellrigel:

Oh, gosh.

Mead:

It was an eight-story manufacturing building, [1:00:40] so there were elevators but going between flights or between floors, I should say, was a bit of a chore. Some of the classes were in an auxiliary building with a couple of blocks in between that were not really [1:01:00] safe, so you kind of had to go in a group.

Hellrigel:

Right, because you’re in old industrial buildings and it’s kind of a vacant area.

Mead:

Well, it was in Brooklyn. It was busy during the day, but at night when a lot of the classes were held, all those [1:01:20] daytime people had gone home.

Hellrigel:

When you’re working at Chase, you’re going to work there for the three years that it took to do the master’s [degree]?

Mead:

No. I was there for about a year and a half. [1:01:40] The master’s ended up taking -- Well, this happened in both cases. It took longer because once I got to where it was only the thesis remaining, I was working. I wasn’t just doing that. So, it took a little longer to [1:02:00] get the thesis done which was in numerical analysis. I had a very nice faculty member that I worked with by the name of Ed Reiss.

Hellrigel:

For the master’s degree.

Mead:

For the master’s degree. By then I was working and [1:02:20] then when I got into the Ph.D. program at Poly, by then I was at IBM. I took a leave of absence so I could finish the course requirements full time. I finished the course requirements [1:02:40] and then qualifying exams while I was going full time and then again in my foolishness, decided I’d be able to finish the thesis part time which was a big mistake, but hindsight is 20/20.

Hellrigel:

Right. At the master’s level, the [1:03:00] gentleman’s name was Ed Reiss?

Mead:

Yes, Reiss.

Hellrigel:

Reiss. This is in applied mathematics.

Mead:

Numerical analysis, so yes, definitely.

Hellrigel:

Numerical analysis.

Mead:

Definitely applied. But on my diploma, it says M.A. in Math. [1:03:20] I think it’s an M.A. in Mathematics. There's no designation on the thesis.

Hellrigel:

How did you select the thesis topic?

Mead:

Numerical analysis was actually one of the courses I had while I was still in [1:03:40] undergrad. I enjoyed it a lot. The courses that I had after that, some of which were more abstract that I didn’t like as much, so I decided that since I was working by then, I could use some of my [1:04:00] programming background to develop some small computer programs to actually do the numerical analysis.

IBM, Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute, Ph.D.

Hellrigel:

You were working one and a half years at Chase and then you jumped to IBM.

Mead:

Right. That was because I realized that at a bank, [1:04:20] programming was something they needed but it wasn't the mainstream thing that got you promotions. You could get promoted up to a certain point and that was it.

Hellrigel:

Yes, you needed --

Mead:

Because [1:04:40] finance wasn’t my expertise. IBM was growing tremendously in New York City in that timeframe. I applied there. I actually applied for more than one [1:05:00] job. There was one that I didn’t get and then I was called back to interview for another one. They made me an offer.

Hellrigel:

This was another time where you saw the ad in the New York Times, or did you hear word of mouth?

Mead:

I think I may have been [1:05:20] using an employment agency to do the search by them.

Hellrigel:

When you’re a programmer at the bank are most of those programmers were women?

Mead:

Oh, no. No. There were maybe, [1:05:40], I'm thinking there were three of us out of fifteen or twenty.

Hellrigel:

Oh, and the machines --

Mead:

It wasn’t the routine day to day bank programming. We were doing what they called operations research. It was more advanced work which was good for my math background. [1:06:00]

Hellrigel:

Was this sort of forecasting?

Mead:

They had aspirations of predicting the stock market.

Hellrigel:

But that was what you were working on.

Mead:

Yes, that, of course, was ridiculous. Then they were trying to [1:06:20] automate some of the trust work that they did. Again, the routine checking and savings accounts stuff: that was a different staff altogether.

Hellrigel:

That was still in the passbook. [Laughing].

Mead:

Right. [1:06:40] Again, in that timeframe, the first programming job that I was given was to modify an existing program that was written in machine code for an RCA 301 computer.

Hellrigel:

[1:07:00] Wow. Are these the big computers that take up the whole room? With the…?

Mead:

It required -- Yes, it’s just like the photos; raised floor, air conditioning.

Hellrigel:

It reminds me of that 1950s movie Desk Set [1:07:20] with Kate Hepburn and Spencer Tracey where she’s a librarian and he’s the salesman for the computers and the human mind is going to just punch all the cards with all the information you have and then you ask the computer a question and of course it was proven to be not [1:07:40] so easy [Laughing].

Mead:

Right, right, right. Yes, it was fascinating looking at it in retrospect. I'm trying to think what language we actually used. It must have been FORTRAN when we got [1:08:00] to a higher-level language.

Hellrigel:

At Chase?

Mead:

Yes. Thankfully we didn’t do any COBOL programming. That was much more painstaking.

Hellrigel:

Was this a forty-hour a week job or did you have a project and you just worked until it was done? [1:08:20]

Mead:

It was thirty-five hours a week. Back then you couldn’t really work much overtime. You really couldn't [1:08:40] because in the evening the only staff that were there, you’d have the machine room, and you’d have people running jobs overnight.

Hellrigel:

Right.

Mead:

But you didn’t really have the opportunity to stay and fix things and turn it around that quickly.

Hellrigel:

Were you still living in New Jersey and [1:09:00] commuting in?

Mead:

Yes. I did it for IBM. By the time I went to work at IBM, it was still, let me think now, it was still punch cards, only they had me [1:09:20] working on time-sharing systems. It was certainly more interesting. That was Assembler Language and BASIC. Again, there were a few women. Virtually all the supervisors were men [1:09:40] because they got promoted from sales positions into management and most of the salespeople were men.

Hellrigel:

This is about 1965 or so when you start?

Mead:

To start, yes, it was 1965. Then I went to [1:10:00] work for IBM at the end of 1966. That was when the 360 had just come out.

Hellrigel:

Oh, wow. There must have been excitement.

Mead:

Well, it came out while I was still at the bank. We used to go to an [1:10:20] IBM location once a week to use some time that had been made available to us on one of the machines. It was a 360 and maybe it was a Model 40. Then when I went to [1:10:40] work for IBM they still had some older… we had a 7044 that we were working on and then it was the time sharing. Then the larger models of 360. [1:11:00]

Hellrigel:

Wow. These are still the big monstrosities.

Mead:

Oh, yes. When you see the photos that IBM at 590 Madison that’s exactly how it was.

Hellrigel:

Yes, IBM is running work for clients.

Mead:

Yes. We were. We even did [1:11:20] development of IBM software products or we were doing custom software for clients.

Hellrigel:

Right, because IBM sold the machine and the software. For different industries. At this [1:11:40] point you’re also going to grad school, did IBM pay for the grad school?

Mead:

Yes. They paid for the tuition. They paid for books. [1:12:00] I'm trying to think if they paid any kind of a commuting [expense]. I don’t remember. I think you could get maybe a couple of hours off a week. It wasn’t much though. They did have a full-time program [1:12:20] but in that timeframe only engineers that were going to be doing the engineering design for machine were the only ones who got into full-time Ph.D. program, not software people.

Hellrigel:

How [1:12:40] competitive was it to get into the graduate program at Brooklyn Poly?

Mead:

Well, considering I already had the master’s degree from NYU, it was pretty easy, and I got the teaching assistantship pretty [1:13:00] quickly, too.

Hellrigel:

I guess you’re -- okay. Was there a break between Chase and IBM that you had the teaching assistantship?

Mead:

No. After I started working for IBM, [1:13:20] I knew I wanted a Ph.D. I took leave of absence from IBM while I had the teaching assistantship, I could afford to take the time off.

Hellrigel:

This is for about a year or two? [1:13:40]

Mead:

It was two years. By the end of that I had finished the coursework and the qualifying exams. I only had the thesis left but then I went back. When I went back to IBM, they had reorganized and I [1:14:00] ended up working in Defense. I quickly got promoted to management: the good news. The bad news is that I stayed in management for about 6 years and during that entire timeframe, the Ph.D. went on the back burner. [1:14:20]

Hellrigel:

The reality of economics.

Mead:

The management job was too demanding. I just could not focus on doing Ph.D. work that really didn’t feed into my day job.

Hellrigel:

Right. Is there [1:14:40] any pressure from Brooklyn Poly to get it finished?

Mead:

My advisor was the most patient guy in the world. IBM paid enough of my [1:15:00] tuition so that I could stay enrolled as a student at Brooklyn Poly. I can’t remember if I had to request an extension. I might have, because it took so long.

Hellrigel:

Right, yes, at most places you had to pay for at least one [1:15:20] credit or whatever or one course, whatever the requirement was.

Mead:

I was paying for thesis which was an official course. I was paying for that. I would meet with my advisor. We’d talk about things. I would do a little bit of work but [1:15:40] I couldn't spend enough dedicated time on it to get the results that I needed.

Hellrigel:

This is with Stanley Preiser?

Mead:

Preiser, yes.

Hellrigel:

Preiser, how did you select him?

Mead:

[1:16:00] Once again I was lucky. A friend who had encouraged me to apply there had done his Ph.D. with him. He was doing applied math. I [1:16:20] worked with Professor Preiser, worked well with him. So, it was a natural fit. I knew I didn’t want to do for example, advanced algebra or advanced differential equations which would have been one of my choices. [1:16:40] It kind of continued the numerical analysis pattern. Then eventually it evolved into more of a software topic. At that time none of those schools had computer science Ph.D. programs. Which [1:17:01] might have made more sense but it didn’t exist.

Hellrigel:

Right, many people that I speak with say it came out of mathematics or occasionally out of EE. You could still see it at different universities, their [1:17:20] culture where the link is. You know EE might have gone to computer engineering and then math goes to computer science and sometimes depending on who does what, they might all come together.

Mead:

It was very unpredictable so by the time I finished [1:17:40] they had computer science Ph.Ds., but I wasn’t about to go back and redo a bunch of coursework just for that.

Hellrigel:

No. No, because you already had your career vector determined and at IBM it wouldn’t have made any difference.

Mead:

No.

Hellrigel:

[1:18:00] Well, one side step. What did your folks think of your achievements? They go to your bachelor’s graduation, your master’s graduation? I mean your dad liked your medal from high school.

Mead:

Well, my dad, while I was [1:18:20] in college, he had a serious heart attack. He kept working. But a lot of those extracurricular things, like graduation, which was outdoors in [1:18:40] June, he didn’t go. My grandmother came up from South Jersey. She and my dad stayed home. My mother and my sister and I went to the graduation. [1:19:00] Laughing] You have really funny memories. One of my memories of that day was on the way home, we stopped at a hot dog stand in New York, a street vendor. [1:19:20] We had what seemed like the best hot dogs we had ever had.

Hellrigel:

Because the stress was off. You did it.

Mead:

I think that’s what it was. Then they had one only my mother went to. They had a [1:19:40] special evening program for the honor students. Since I had done the French honors program, I went to that. My mother sat with me. I don’t remember if we got called up [1:20:00] individually. I know it was on my diploma. The diplomas we didn’t actually receive at the graduation because they did all of NYU’s graduation together, so it was a massive number of students. We didn’t go up and get diplomas.

Hellrigel:

Yes. I went to my [1:20:20] friend’s NYU Ph.D. graduation. The whole big assembly took place at Yankee Stadium. Back in, I don’t know, 2002, somewhere around there.

Mead:

Well, of course by then the school was huge. Ours [1:20:40] was held on the uptown campus outdoors.

Hellrigel:

Then your master’s and you’re still commuting. Then you’re working on the Ph.D. Are you one of the few women managers at the time? How did that [1:21:00] work? You said you were management for six years.

Mead:

There were a few because there weren’t that many women programmers. I won’t say -- there was no direct bias [1:21:20] but there were a lot of indirect things that happened in terms of being able to get the leadership opportunities that would lead you to be appointed as a manager. I think the main reason, and I didn’t really [1:21:40] have enough of an idea of how to plan a career in that timeframe to think, oh, this is what I really want to do and what steps do I need to take to get there. It just kind of evolved. I take part of the blame for that. But what happened was the [1:22:00] very first job in management there was one guy who had more seniority than I did. In fact, two of the guys had more seniority. But they used to hold a weekly progress meeting. [1:22:20] One of the two guys was a complete disaster in terms of being organized. When he had to report on progress, he was all over the map. The other one was a [1:22:40] really nice guy and very bright but he was more of an individual achiever in terms of organizational and leadership skills he wasn’t there. They put me in to report on what the team was doing. I organized [1:23:00] things the way I wanted to and then I got the recognition. Of course, it took a while because I would be one of the few women in a meeting of about 40 men.

Hellrigel:

Wow.

Mead:

From all of these different departments and the first thing they automatically [1:23:20] think is that it’s somebody’s secretary and does she actually know anything. You kind of had to overcome all of that.

Hellrigel:

Yes. Sort of a thicker skin.

Mead:

Yes, oh, very much which I guess is both a good thing and a bad thing because then at certain [1:23:40] points in my career that kind of hurt me, too. You end up having to be very assertive and in some environments that doesn’t go over so well.

Hellrigel:

You’re working at IBM, and do you make a move to New York City [1:24:00] residentially?

Mead:

I was working in New York City. I didn’t live there because it cost twice as much.

Hellrigel:

You stayed in New Jersey.

Mead:

I stayed in New Jersey. Well, when I started working in Defense I was actually working in [1:24:20] New Jersey. Then kind of typical the Defense work went wherever the project was. I was in working in New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, [1:24:40] Maryland, and Colorado.

Hellrigel:

You’re still working for IBM, or do you leave IBM?

Mead:

I left IBM. I worked my way through. Now this is, of course, long after I finished the Ph.D. [1:25:00] I got into senior management, a more senior management position working my way up through several promotions. Then I was promoted to Senior Technical Staff Member [1:25:20] which is the technical level, it’s not a management position per se, it’s the technical level immediately below IBM Fellow which was a huge deal. I was in the [1:25:40] Federal Systems Division which is where all the Defense software was being developed. I may have been the only female senior technical staff member in the division. There were women who were, by then, in senior management [1:26:00] positions but very few if any. It kind of ran parallel to the positions in Research, in the Research Division.

Hellrigel:

Just making a note here. [1:26:20] When you make this shift to IBM Federal System Division, does that mean that you’re going to move out of New York City, or you moved like every six months or how many months where of the project?

Mead:

Well, it’s however many [1:26:40] years. I was in New Jersey on that project for four years. Then Massachusetts for four years. In Maryland I was at our headquarters location for six years. Then [1:27:00] Colorado for three years which was my last position within IBM.

Hellrigel:

Wow. Well, someone told me a joke IBM really stands for I’ve Been Moved.

Mead:

It’s an interesting [1:27:20] phenomenon because kind of your social environment is built around the people that you work with. It’s that whole IBM family idea with the country clubs and [1:27:40] family dinners. It was just an interesting organizational model.

Hellrigel:

Well, the joke was at IBM the suits were IBM blue: like a standard. Did the women have a certain [1:28:00] dress code?

Mead:

Yes. When I, [Laughing] I think I was on leave of absence when they were first allowed to wear pants.

Hellrigel:

Before that, dresses?

Mead:

Right. That would have been around [1:28:20] 1971, maybe.

Hellrigel:

Pants would be a pant suit.

Mead:

Oh, definitely. There was no thought of wearing jeans or something else like that.

Hellrigel:

Or khakis and a button-down.

Mead:

Right. On the other hand, some of the miniskirts were so short [Laughing].

Hellrigel:

They were drafty. [1:28:40]

Mead:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

But I would imagine that if you were management, that wasn’t accepted? The miniskirts?

Mead:

Well, you could wear a miniskirt, but not a really short one. It was kind of like a [1:29:00] Bermuda Shorts versus Short-Shorts is the comparison that I’d make.

Hellrigel:

Then you would have a wardrobe with your business suits.

Mead:

Yes. It wasn’t really -- some of this was not in writing, it was just the way things were.

Hellrigel:

[1:29:20] Yes, the cultural code. Wow. At this point you’re meeting a lot of people, globally or within the US. Did you ever think of leaving IBM?

Mead:

[1:29:40] No, not until I actually -- well, there were two points in time. When I lived in Massachusetts, I really liked it there. I almost interviewed for some other jobs but then in the end decided against it. [1:30:00] Even though it meant moving. Then the next time I thought about it was when I actually did leave.

Hellrigel:

Right, because in 1991 you start with SEI?

Mead:

In 1990. [1:30:20] Well, part of the reason I left was that by then they were trying to downsize. They offered one of these incentive deals. It was two weeks of salary for every year of service. [1:30:40] It was the first time that software people were eligible for the incentive because prior to that they never wanted to lose software people. They kind of still didn’t but they [1:31:00] were in enough of a bind that anybody was eligible, including us.

Hellrigel:

Yes, this would be the time a few people I’ve talked to there was, I don’t know, Westchester County and then they had the center in Boca. Then IBM had the [1:31:20] campus in Boca and then that closed. So, there was a lot of… oh, the 1980s were a real challenge for Corporate America. As the conglomeration because a mindset and a lot of companies were changing.

Mead:

Well, [1:31:40] big mainframes weren’t the main focus. They were concentrating on PCs and smaller machines so the whole environment changed and my thinking at the [1:32:00] time was, well, I can take this incentive deal and then I have to look for another job. But if I stay here, then I have to try to finish the project that I'm working on with whoever is left.

Hellrigel:

True. It is at this point, too, the shift [1:32:20] is to the personal computers and the software is being created by other companies? The IBM computers used to have its own -- I forget the -- I know Word Perfect is what I used with my IBM machine. [1:32:40] There was that difference. But I know that the whole industry was fracturing into many different software companies, many different manufacturers of the PCs, and so the whole terrain sort of shook.

Mead:

Well, [1:33:00] I wasn’t part of it but they had, in my opinion, one of the best compiler development groups anywhere and they let that go.

Hellrigel:

Ah.

Mead:

When things like that started happening, you’re kind of, oh, what are these [1:33:20] executive managers thinking of? But it was all about the bottom line.

Hellrigel:

Yes, Emerson Pugh has written a few books about IBM. I'm starting to wade my way through them. One of my fields is Business History and you just looked at many companies at that time [1:33:40] were making uh, manufacturing offshore and generational shifts in the way they were doing business and that would be one of the big differences. When you worked for IBM you’re there when they have the personal computer. [1:34:00] Then personal computers started to pop up and be an office machine instead of the typewriter. Did you get a personal computer on your desk?

Mead:

Let me think about that for a second.

Hellrigel:

I mean not that it matters but maybe your support staff or secretarial staff made that shift. [1:34:20]

Mead:

Well, we certainly had our own workstations. They were just dumb terminals. Of course, I had a PC at home as did my husband.

Hellrigel:

Oh, but what did you --

Mead:

[1:34:40] He was also with IBM.

Hellrigel:

Oh, what was your first PC at home? Was that a 286 or…?

Mead:

Probably. I can’t remember anymore.

Hellrigel:

Yes, I think my first one was an IBM PC. [1:35:00] 486? I bought it around, I want to say 1986, at a computer shop. It cost more than my early cars. [Laughing]

Mead:

[Laughing] Well, we had a couple of them. One [1:35:20] of them was a PS-2 that was more advanced and very expensive.

Hellrigel:

Yes.

Mead:

Then we had a portable, but I think it weighed forty pounds.

Hellrigel:

Oh, I had a portable one when I was working on my dissertation and going from archive to archive. I recycled it before I got [1:35:40] my job at the IEEE History Center where we’re collecting artifacts for a global museum. But I know I carried around my desk top PC- maybe it was a 386, it was the size of a TV laid down and that I kept the original box for packing, and I drove it [1:36:00] around the country. Then I bought an early laptop. I bought the special backpack, the padded backpack. I couldn’t use it in Europe because it didn’t have the converter. You needed that.

Mead:

[Laughing] Well, mine didn’t get carried around I can assure you of that. The interesting thing [1:36:20] was that I actually ended up selling it because there was somebody, maybe in Japan, that was buying a boatload of these things. There was actually a market for it, of sorts.

Hellrigel:

Yes, probably should have looked into that but usually I keep things [1:36:40] until they die. My first computer, well, in grad school we did the punch card things. When I worked for the Thomas Edison Papers at Rutgers University, we had a Xerox 8088 or something like that. You had to put the software in on a disk that was the size of a 78 [1:37:00] record. Then you put in the disk that you wrote your document on. Yes. I mean the format’s changed so drastically.

Mead:

Well, the thing of it was that as an employee you [1:37:20] basically got those devices a half price.

Hellrigel:

Well, that makes sense.

Mead:

But so, the PS-2 that we got would have been $12,000 but it was only $6,000 for employees. It’s hard to imagine now. [1:37:40]

Hellrigel:

Yes, I think back. My computer, I probably still have the bill with something like almost $3,000 by the time you bought the monitor, software, and other components. But I needed it for the master’s thesis. The first draft I wrote on a Corona Selectric Electric typewriter. Then working [1:38:00] full time it took a couple of years to write the master’s thesis and I made that jump to the computer. Yes.

Mead:

Well, that was one benefit that I got when I got to the Ph.D. thesis. They actually gave me a support person to type it for me. [1:38:20] That was a big deal. My master’s thesis, I don’t remember what -- I know when I was an undergrad my mother used to help me with the typing, or I should say she would do some of those clerical things for me. [1:38:40] That I would be freed up to actually study.

Personal life, travel

Hellrigel:

You mentioned that your husband also worked for IBM.

Mead:

Yes, he started in his first job, I didn’t know him then, but his first job was on the Space Program developing software for [1:39:00] Projects Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo.

Hellrigel:

Wow.

Mead:

He was in Mission Control the night of the moon landing.

Hellrigel:

That must have been exciting.

Mead:

I'm sure it was to him. He [1:39:20] really treasured it. I believe you can’t -- it was a second marriage… he found it kind of frustrating that his family didn’t know what he was talking about. I met him much later, but that [1:39:40] was one of the things that we had in common, and I guess it’s no surprise. Just about everybody that I dated was an engineer or a scientist because anybody else who had more of a liberal arts background, as soon as they heard that you can study math, they kind of [1:40:00] disappeared on me.

Hellrigel:

Oh, yes, well, the bias that you were maybe geeky or something.

Mead:

Right. Well, maybe smarter than they were.

Hellrigel:

Oh, that, too. Your husband’s name?

Mead:

His name was Elwood Mead.

Hellrigel:

E-L-W-O-O-D Mead. [1:40:20]

Mead:

Yes. Interestingly, Lake Mead is named for an Elwood Mead who was the Secretary of Parks and Interior, but it’s no relative, which is interesting considering it’s kind of an unusual name. [1:40:40]

Hellrigel:

Mead is a common last name in the U.K. I believe. But Elwood?

Mead:

He was some mix of English, Irish, and German. [1:41:00]

Hellrigel:

His background was mathematics or computer engineering?

Mead:

Well, he started in physics at what was then Carnegie Tech. Then switched to math. [1:41:20] That’s where it stayed. He was a few years older than me so there was certainly no computing. But he saw it and he had applied for IBM and applied for the job. He said he told them that he didn’t know anything about programming and they [1:41:40] said that’s okay, we’ll train you. That was it.

Hellrigel:

Yes. So, you met him at IBM?

Mead:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

But for you then was there a challenge work/life balance? [1:42:00]

Mead:

Not too much because I didn’t meet him until later.

Hellrigel:

Okay.

Mead:

Work, it wasn’t so much work-wise, it was more that he had been married before and it was his first marriage was very traditional. He and his wife had [1:42:20] four kids. She didn’t work or if she did work it was maybe part time.

Hellrigel:

Right.

Mead:

In retail. He was pretty much the breadwinner. When [1:42:40] he and I met, he kind of had the idea that at home that things would be similar, which obviously wasn’t happening. [Laughing]

Hellrigel:

[Laughing] Did he expect you to quit your job?

Mead:

Oh, no. no. I'm trying [1:43:00] to think. Oh, I know. It was comical [Laughing]. In fact, his daughter used it as a case study in her psychology class.

Hellrigel:

[Laughing].

Mead:

He had the idea that I would give up all my credit cards and use his.

Hellrigel:

Not realizing how difficult it was as a woman to get a credit card in her name.

Mead:

[1:43:20] To even get one in the first place. Yes. There were some other things like, oh, the other one was the computers. This was equally as comical. He said, oh, well, you don’t need a computer, you can use mine when I'm not using it.

Hellrigel:

Oh.

Mead:

[Laughing] Which by then was never [Laughing].

Hellrigel:

Right. [1:43:40] Did he expect you to give up your car?

Mead:

Oh, no.

Hellrigel:

No? [Laughing].

Mead:

[Laughing]. That was a nonstarter. He did have the idea at first that whenever we went anywhere together that he would drive, but I think that was a [1:44:00] holdover from his first marriage. But he actually realized that if he wasn’t driving, he could read. Then he was very happy to have me drive instead of him, especially if it was a [1:44:20] long trip.

Hellrigel:

About what year did you marry?

Mead:

That would have been 1987.

Hellrigel:

1987. So this is around when you get your Ph.D. Well, a few years after the Ph.D.

Mead:

Yes, yes.

Hellrigel:

Four or five years.

Mead:

Yes, I already had it.

Hellrigel:

Then do you have [1:44:40] that off your back, the Ph.D. Is this the point where you’re going to start moving around?

Mead:

Oh, no, I had already moved and so had he. He had moved differently. He lived [1:45:00] at different times from me, Maryland, New Jersey, Massachusetts, California. When we got married, we both moved to Colorado. It was kind of unique.

Hellrigel:

Did you just luck out in both finding [1:45:20]… or did you try to make it happen?

Mead:

In terms of what?

Hellrigel:

To move to Colorado.

Mead:

Oh, to move to Colorado?

Hellrigel:

That you would be living in separate states or whatever.

Mead:

Well, California was a small location so that was kind [1:45:40] of a nonstarter. It would have made more sense for him to move to Maryland. But then he was just starting a new project which was the one in Colorado. [1:46:00] They hadn’t actually staffed the software team, so I went in as the lead software architect on the project. Well, for both of us it was a lateral move to a nice place. [1:46:20] That was good.

Hellrigel:

This Colorado Springs?

Mead:

Boulder. Our customer was in California. Let me think of the… [1:46:40] one of the sites we -- by then we were working on satellites. One of the sites would have been in Colorado Springs. The other one was in Australia.

Hellrigel:

Oh. Did you get to travel to Australia? [1:47:00]

Mead:

Well, I did but not on that project. When I was at headquarters, we were doing some training out there and I was managing the training software training group, so I went out there [1:47:20] for that. He and I went there just on vacation. Then much later I went out there as a keynote speaker at a conference. I made three trips to Australia.

Hellrigel:

When you’re saying customers, [1:47:40] is this like the U.S. Air Force, the U.S. Army?

Mead:

Yes. Exactly. It was Air Force. That particular customer was Air Force Space Command.

Hellrigel:

[1:48:00] I think Howard Michel [the 2015 IEEE President] had Air Force career and then some of his work through research projects was with Air Force Space Command.

Mead:

Actually, it’s not unusual [1:48:20] that all of the projects were classified. Defense projects. Being able to get and maintain a security clearance was important. It also kind of guaranteed [1:48:40] you that you would always be able to have a position on one of those projects.

Hellrigel:

What could you do that would jeopardize your security clearance? Like have a gambling debt or…?

Mead:

[Laughing] keep classified documents in your garage.

Hellrigel:

Yes, like [1:49:00] a few people.

Mead:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

Take them home to sell on eBay.

Mead:

Well, they worried about different things so, yes, a gambling debt would be one of them. Mishandling classified information. [1:49:20] Let me think. When I first started working, they were concerned about homosexuality.

Hellrigel:

Right, that would have been a…

Mead:

It wasn’t so much that they cared about that, but they thought it was something [1:49:40] where people could be coerced into being bribed or giving bribes--

Hellrigel:

Right, like blackmail.

Mead:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

Yes.

Mead:

Then they worried about, and probably still do, about mental instability.

Hellrigel:

Oh, true.

Mead:

That’s somebody might do something that was [1:50:00] not logical. That was typically what it was. But the background check as you got higher levels of clearance was pretty extensive. Eventually, [1:50:20] you would only get cleared to work on a specific project they considered very sensitive and if you weren’t working on that project that particular clearance would be removed.

Hellrigel:

Yes, very [1:50:40] siloed.

Mead:

Yes, intentionally.

Hellrigel:

Yes. Right. Did you get to pick the projects, like you moved from New Jersey, so I guess that was with the military bases in Jersey?

Mead:

Oh, you always got to pick. Well, you might not have… usually [1:51:00] as an example when I moved to Maryland, I interviewed for two projects, and I interviewed for a technology position at headquarters which was the one that I ended up with. If I hadn’t liked those [1:51:20] I would have probably had the opportunity to interview for a project somewhere else. When we moved from New Jersey -- people went all over. Some of them went to Manassas, Virginia, some went to Gaithersburg. Our little group went to Massachusetts. [1:51:40] Some of them went to IBM Commercial locations. So, yes, they always had choices.

Hellrigel:

Is this because you move around, I know New Jersey at some point the military bases are consolidated and closed, did that have any impact?

Mead:

[1:52:00] It did but as well, particular contracts ending would have an impact.

Hellrigel:

Then you were also like maybe in between the military and the manufacturers? For the equipment?

Mead:

Sometimes. For example, one project, we were doing software [1:52:20] development for Raytheon on Control Data [Corporation (CDC)] machines. Of course, once again, the customer, the ultimate customer was the Air Force.

Hellrigel:

Yes, then the DOD [1:52:40]. Did you have to go to Washington? Did you ever get involved in any Senate committees and all that kind of hearing and stuff?

Mead:

Not me. I had to go to various [1:53:00] sites where the software was being used. As it was being delivered and installed sometimes once in a while, we would have that kind of a trip. At least for me, it was once in a while. Sometimes people would go there on a temporary basis for six months [1:53:20] to a year, but I wasn’t one of them.

Hellrigel:

I know the projects you can’t talk about, but do you have any memorable experiences like trips or that with this type of work for IBM?

Mead:

Well, before I started doing that [1:53:40] I was working on the commercial side, and I had two interesting trips. One was to San Jose. At that point you flew into San Francisco. You drove to San Jose. [1:54:00] The only town in between really was Palo Alto. The San Jose location was in the middle of farmland.

Hellrigel:

Oh, okay. That was early on then.

Mead:

Yes. Looking at it [1:54:20] in retrospect it was pretty amazing. So that was one trip. Another one… I think the second one was later. But it was still commercial work. I went to the lab in Hursley in the [1:54:40] U.K. The reason I went is that they were doing some simulation work over there that we were interested in. You couldn't really do anything [1:55:00] remotely so I went over and met my counterpart. Some of the things that were surprising were kind of unique to IBM. They weren’t the business aspects; it was more this [1:55:20] social part of business. One of the things that they had in Hursley was they had morning and afternoon tea service. The tea cart came around with actual china on it. No paper cups or anything like we might [1:55:40] have had in New York City.

Hellrigel:

Or you’d have in the factory, the factory people might get the paper cups, but upper management got the real china.

Mead:

Well, this was a coffee cart, a station, but with real china.

Hellrigel:

Right. Yes.

Mead:

Then the cafeteria [1:56:00] served alcoholic beverages.

Hellrigel:

Wow.

Mead:

Which in the U.S. was unheard of.

Hellrigel:

No, if you wanted to “businessman’s lunch” you had to go offsite.

Mead:

Even then you’d think about it before you would have a beer or a wine at lunchtime. [1:56:20]

Hellrigel:

Yes, especially maybe what went over in the 1940s or 1950s started to change.

Mead:

But in Europe they realized that local customs were different. One thing that I learned on that trip was that [1:56:40] if you worked for IBM and you were in any country in the world where there was an IBM office, so let’s say I was in Paris on vacation, if I had a problem, I could call the IBM [1:57:00] branch manager for help.

Hellrigel:

Wow.

Mead:

So, if I had a problem with my passport, if I got arrested, if I ran out of money…

Hellrigel:

Wow.

Mead:

I could contact that branch office. If I ran out of money, I could get an advance. [1:57:20]

Hellrigel:

Did you ever have to call a branch office?

Mead:

Yes, but not for that. They did help me one time get a hotel reservation. In fact, they helped me a couple of times with personal travel things but, no, I never had [1:57:40] a -- thankfully I never had any experiences where I had to do that.

Hellrigel:

Did your work ever bring you to the Eastern Bloc, like East Germany, Russia? China?

Mead:

No.

Hellrigel:

In this early period?

Mead:

No. I went to, [1:58:00] at the time it was the Soviet Union, but it was on vacation. I was part of a tour group.

Hellrigel:

That didn’t jeopardize your security clearance?

Mead:

No. But it was a little uncomfortable [1:58:20].

Hellrigel:

Probably had to register it.

Mead:

Well, just by virtue of -- not from IBM’s viewpoint.

Hellrigel:

Oh, from?

Mead:

But getting the tourist visa. When you got to the Soviet Union the first [1:58:40] thing they did was take your passports. You would eventually get them back at your hotel or something. It was very uncomfortable. In the hotels. At that time the tourist hotels were different from the [1:59:00] hotels where locals would stay.

Hellrigel:

Yes.

Mead:

Each hotel had someone; it was always an elderly woman on each floor that kept the room keys. When you left the hotel [1:59:20] you turned in your key.

Hellrigel:

In case someone wanted to survey it.

Mead:

Right. When you got back you got your key back.

Hellrigel:

Did you ever have a feeling that someone tossed your room?

Mead:

Yes. Now, of course, [1:59:40] I was on vacation so there was nothing there.

Hellrigel:

Yes.

Mead:

Yes. There was one time that I went back, and it looked like things had been rearranged.

Hellrigel:

Wow.

Mead:

I was probably more aware of that and when you applied for a visa, they had all that information. [2:00:00]

Hellrigel:

Right. But they probably wanted to make sure you didn’t have any micro cameras and other things.

Mead:

I don't know, it was a long time ago.

Hellrigel:

Wow.

Mead:

But it was kind of okay, and we had some free time here. There in the big cities but we were [2:00:20] -- I don’t think I was with anybody else from IBM but the Americans I was with; we were pretty careful.

Hellrigel:

Yes, so this tourist group was just from the travel agency or?

Mead:

Yes, it wasn’t an IBM group by then, even though I was working for IBM [2:00:40].

Hellrigel:

Wow. Then I don’t know if you want to say anything more about IBM before we make the jump to SEI.

Mead:

[Pause]. Well, I enjoyed the [2:01:01] time that I spent there. I did a lot of work that I enjoyed. For the most part it was a supportive environment. Certainly, for somebody [2:01:20] in software in that timeframe it was the place to be.

Hellrigel:

Okay, you said for the most part they were supportive. I guess sometimes if the business ebbed and flowed it’d be tense?

Mead:

Well, when you were working [2:01:40] on Defense, those projects could be pretty stressful.

Hellrigel:

Oh, oh, yes.

Mead:

Yes. There was a lot of pressure. A lot of overtime.

Hellrigel:

And your salary?

Mead:

For things that… right. Right. Right. Oh, well yes, so they were --

Hellrigel:

No overtime pay, just hours.

Mead:

Right, [2:02:00] in fact they’d bid overtime. The contract bids included overtime even though they knew you weren’t getting paid for it.

Hellrigel:

Well. What did you do to decompress then? Eventually you could get a vacation day or two [Laughing]?

Mead:

Well, when I was single, we would go out after work [2:02:20] which was usually around 7:00 o'clock at night and get something to eat and talk. At some casual place. After I got married, well, I liked to cook so I would go home and cook dinner. Which sounds odd but [2:02:40] I did enjoy doing something that was totally different from work.

Hellrigel:

It was an outlet.

Mead:

There was no option in doing any work at home. Which was a good thing, actually.

Hellrigel:

Then when you left the office you closed the door and that was that.

Mead:

You were done. [2:03:00] You might be working late but when you left, you were done.

Hellrigel:

You probably had to go through security to make sure you weren’t taking papers and things like that? Maybe not?

Mead:

No, because those would go back in a safe.

Hellrigel:

Oh, okay. That’s that classified [Laughing]. [2:03:20]

Mead:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

Wow.

Mead:

Well, that was standard. Not every day. You wouldn’t be using classified information every day anyway.

Hellrigel:

But the pressure. Then they’re going to give you the buyout and it sounds like it was too good to pass up. [2:03:40]

Software Engineering Institute, Carnegie Mellon

Mead:

Well, it was funny the way it evolved. Because when it came along, I had been thinking of taking a leave of absence. Carnegie Mellon, the SEI, actually, had the option of going there for a year as a visitor. [2:04:00] Then returning to your company. I had gotten approval of three levels of management. When it got to the fourth level, they said, well, we need you on this project, we don’t need you to be at Carnegie Mellon. So, I was unhappy about that [2:04:20]. Then I had put in a research proposal that didn’t get funded.

About that same timeframe, they came out with the incentive deal. I thought, well, maybe I should think about this a little more seriously. It was two weeks of salary [2:04:40] for every year of service. We’re in Colorado. I started thinking about it. Now my husband, at that point, only had two years to go before he could get his full retirement. He didn’t want to take this deal. I said, fine, I'll look for a job [2:05:00] in the Denver area. See what comes up. Maybe go to work at a university out here. Be an interesting change. We went on vacation to Hawaii. Now in Hawaii, [2:05:20] there was no internet. People weren’t making phone calls from work, so you basically forgot about everything for two weeks. While we were gone, they changed the incentive deal so if you had been working for IBM [2:05:40] for more than twenty-five years, you could take a leave of absence, get your full retirement, and get the incentive deal and go work for somebody else. At that point [2:06:00] there was no reason to stick around Denver. I called up Carnegie Mellon and said, well, I'm actually looking for a job now. They made me an immediate offer. Then he interviewed and got an offer. We left IBM and [2:06:20] started at the SEI on a Monday. We left IBM on a Friday and started at the SEI on a Monday with basically… let me think about this. [2:06:40] Between us, basically each of us getting a year’s salary from the incentive deal. My husband’s on a leave of absence, it’s for his retirement, I'm not and it was a lateral move. [2:07:00]. We got our same salaries, this big incentive deal, and we haven’t lost anything.

Hellrigel:

You make this jump in 1990.

Mead:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

Wow. How did you get on SEI’s radar?

Mead:

Actually, [2:07:20] when I was in Maryland at IBM, my boss was involved in the original RFP for the Software Engineering Institute. That would have been Neal Eastman. [2:07:40]. I knew about the proposal. The University of Maryland was bidding on it as was Carnegie Mellon. Maryland lost. When Carnegie Mellon [2:08:00] got the project, they actually hired some people from IBM who I knew

Hellrigel:

Who would that be?

Mead:

They hired some people from Federal Systems who I knew, who knew me and [2:08:20] knew my work. Incidentally before I had even thought of leaving IBM, the very first education conference that the SEI had, we published a couple of papers at that conference. [2:08:40] I had been aware of it. Then when I was thinking of going there on the leave of absence, I had gone out there and talked to people, some of whom I knew. Then by the time I called them up and said [2:09:00] I was looking for an actual job, they basically made me an offer.

Hellrigel:

This is a big jump. Now you’re going into education which is different.

Mead:

Well, sort of. But then when I was at IBM, one of my jobs had been managing the Software Engineering Education Group [2:09:20] for Federal Systems.

Hellrigel:

Oh, that’s right.

Mead:

We were training software engineers at seven different sites. I had a staff of something like ten faculty [2:09:40] and two admin support people.

Hellrigel:

How did you make that jump into the education part of it at IBM?

Mead:

Well, in technology, the education was basically on the same floor at our headquarters building and people went back and forth. [2:10:00]. An open position came up that turned out to be a promotion. I looked at the position and came up with a plan for what I would do if I had the job and that was it. [2:10:20].

Hellrigel:

That was fortunate for you. Then that’s when you’re based in Maryland.

Mead:

Yes. I was teaching part time at the University of Maryland, too.

Hellrigel:

The computer engineering software?

Mead:

It was a computer science course. [2:10:40] At first it was, oh, they had a basic computing course that everybody had. It was a required course. They were mostly juniors and seniors. Then I was teaching software engineering. I taught there. [2:11:00] It was all part time for a while and then Johns Hopkins started a program in a kind of a branch location, and I was teaching software engineering there.

Hellrigel:

You made that segue.

Mead:

Yes, I kind of did that as a [2:11:20] spare time activity. [Laughing].

Hellrigel:

Just to keep yourself busy, [Laughing]

Mead:

[Laughing]. In case I was -- maybe that was a precursor to my retirement, and I didn't realize it [Laughing].

Hellrigel:

Yes, some little birdie in your head but unbeknownst to you was programming you for your next [2:11:40] adventure.

Mead:

Seems to be the case. Seems to always be the case. At the SEI, off and on, I taught software engineering at Carnegie Mellon in the graduate program.

Hellrigel:

[2:12:00] Did you like teaching?

Mead:

I did. I had actually done it from the time I was a teaching assistant. That was actually a useful experience because it made me realize that I did not want to be full time in academe. [2:12:20].

Hellrigel:

How come?

Mead:

It was too much politics.

Hellrigel:

Oh, the whole tenure --

Mead:

Much more than in industry in that timeframe.

Hellrigel:

I guess you saw some ugly things.

Mead:

Yes. [2:12:40]

Hellrigel:

Were they annoying?

Mead:

It’s hard to describe, you know? It was all about getting tenure and if you weren’t…

Hellrigel:

Right. Publish or perish.

Mead:

Publish or perish, yes, people who respected you… [2:13:00] --

Hellrigel:

Yes, it’s a different world --

Mead:

It just didn’t feel like something that I wanted to do as a career.

Hellrigel:

Yes, and it probably would have been a salary differential.

Mead:

Well, there was that. The bias. There was much more bias. When I was a teaching [2:13:20] assistant and I know it wasn’t intentional, I asked if there was an opportunity to do it in the summer. So, I would continue to have some income. The department head came right out and told me that they didn’t need [2:13:40] as many people in the summer and they usually gave those positions to men who were supporting families.

Hellrigel:

Wow. Yes, this is when?

Mead:

[2:14:00] This is in the early 1970s.

Hellrigel:

But still. It was right after that, there will be court cases or around that time, but you can’t change attitude because you’d have to sue.

Mead:

Yes. In a university, you don’t have [2:14:20] ways of appealing things like that.

Hellrigel:

Exactly.

Mead:

There was no place to go. In a company, there were pathways. There were places you could go if you had a grievance but in a university? Now if you do something to make the department chair unhappy [2:14:40] with you, it’s not going to be good for your career.

Hellrigel:

Right, yes. They’re the absolute power especially at non-union shops. Yes, academia can be very brutal. [2:15:00] Now you make this jump to SEI and what do you do for them?

Mead:

They had a big education program at the national level. They had two sets of curriculum development and [2:15:20] [course] offerings. One was the master’s in software engineering and the other one was a parallel continuing education program.

Hellrigel:

Oh.

Mead:

I started out [2:15:40] -- let me think about this. They started out in continuing education. One of the first things that I got to do, we had some visitors who were going to be teaching in the Air Force. The first thing that I got to do was to work with [2:16:00] them. Because they were developing courses to deliver at the Air Force Institute of Technology in Dayton. I got to work with them and mentor them to develop courses that they would then deliver. [2:16:20] I was also doing course development for SEI’s own continuing education program. Now they grew the education program so that I think from April to [2:16:40] the following January, the following January, I was asked to take a management position in education. I don’t remember [2:17:00] when it took place, but from there they reorganized, and I was in a higher-level management position where all of the education activities reported to me. At that time all of the master’s programs’ [2:17:20] faculty for the software engineering degrees at Carnegie Mellon, almost all the faculty came from the SEI. That was one little group that reported to me. Then the other little group was continuing education at the SEI. [2:17:40]

Hellrigel:

Oh, SEI was not part of Carnegie Mellon, it was just based there.

Mead:

It was a contract with Carnegie Mellon. It was a federally funded research and development center. It still is.

Hellrigel:

Okay, a contract. Okay, are they still at Carnegie Mellon?

Mead:

Yes. [2:18:00] It’s a five-year renewable contract. Every five years it comes up for renewal. We might have different primary contacts as the sponsor, but yes, [2:18:20] it’s been renewed, and it’s grown tremendously since I started. I'm sorry, I'm talking about it like I'm still there, you know, I'm retired. [Laughing].

Hellrigel:

Yes, I guess you left there around 1994?

Mead:

Sorry?

Hellrigel:

Did you leave there in 1994? [2:18:40]

Mead:

Carnegie Mellon? No. I stayed there until I retired. I retired completely in 2018.

Hellrigel:

Oh, because somewhere on the internet where I was looking at your material, it noted that you were at SEI only 1991 to 1994. [2:19:00].

Mead:

But that was the education management position.

Hellrigel:

Oh, okay.

Mead:

In 1995, they changed the sponsoring organization. Still within [2:19:20] the government. Education was deemphasized. In 1995, I started working in cybersecurity research.

Hellrigel:

Oh, okay, that’s where that comes in.

Mead:

Right. Still at the SEI.

Hellrigel:

Okay. [2:19:40] Well, that probably becomes even more important after 9/11.

Mead:

It was pretty important then but, no, back then nobody knew what I was talking about when I told them what I was doing.

Hellrigel:

[2:20:00] You’re there twenty-eight years then.

Mead:

I didn’t actually – well, I retired [Laughing] officially in 2016 and then I continued part time for a couple of years. [2:20:20] Then finally I said, well, you know, [Laughing], I don’t really need to work. Maybe I should rethink this, so in 2018 I retired completely. Shortly after that they asked me if I wanted to apply for a different position. [2:20:40].

Hellrigel:

[Laughing]

Mead:

But after I thought about it, I said, well, twenty years ago I would have loved to have jumped into something else, but not now.

Hellrigel:

What did they want you to do?

Mead:

It was a position on campus that was filled by somebody else [2:21:00] eventually.

Hellrigel:

Okay. Oh, but you were going to become a CMU employee directly.

Mead:

Yes, I knew what the job was. Technically it was interesting, but it was very [2:21:20] difficult because you were supervising research practices, sorry, research projects that faculty were working on. But the faculty didn’t actually report to you. They reported to their departments.

Hellrigel:

You’re [2:21:40] an oversight agency to evaluate them.

Mead:

Right.

Hellrigel:

That’s tough.

Mead:

The ultimate customer…

Hellrigel:

Is the President [Laughing]?

Mead:

Well, no. Well, the ultimate customer, it’s more government work, is in [Washington], D.C. [2:22:00] You’re back and forth to [Washington], D.C. trying to make them happy. At the same time, you’re supervising faculty projects where the faculty don’t report to you.

Hellrigel:

But you evaluate them and so…

Mead:

Hope that you have something to say about it. [2:22:20] I looked at that and I said that at a different point in time I would have jumped at the chance but not now.

Hellrigel:

Is that when you moved to Savannah?

Mead:

I moved to South Carolina in 2019. [2:22:40] Well, before that I had been splitting my time. I had been working from home, more or less, since around 2005. It was before people did that as a matter of routine, but I was able [2:23:00] to do it.

Hellrigel:

Oh, so then that’s when you could split your time between Pittsburgh and?

Mead:

Yes. When I was in Pittsburgh I would go into the office if I had to, maybe a couple of times a week.

Hellrigel:

[2:23:20] Did you like Pittsburgh when you were there?

Mead:

I loved it except for the weather.

Hellrigel:

Oh, yes, it’s a bitter winter but good arts community and things like that.

Mead:

Yes. Wonderful. I would tell people I could get home from the theater in Pittsburgh in that same amount of time [2:23:40] that it took me to get out of the garage at the Kennedy Center in Washington.

Hellrigel:

Wow. Probably the same timeframe in Brooklyn [Laughing].

Mead:

[Laughing]. Well, from Brooklyn --

Hellrigel:

The congestion. You know [2:24:00] --

Mead:

Well, from Brooklyn or from New York if you were at the theater, generally you weren’t driving. It was just too hard.

Hellrigel:

No, I take the bus or the train. I don’t know if you’d like to add [2:24:20] anything about SEI. On Part Two we could go into your organizational society work.

Mead:

Sure, we can talk more about what I did at the SEI. It’s pretty interesting. Even though it’s more government work. [2:24:40] None of it is really that sensitive.

Hellrigel:

We’ll pick up with SEI because I’ve had you yacking a while. Then we can go to the societies and the fellowships and then I’ve seen a reference to the Nancy Mead Award for Excellence in Software Engineering [2:24:59] Education. You could fill me in on that. Then you could fill me in on your ACM work and then you work with John Impagliazzo.

Mead:

CC-2020 was one of the big things we worked on. But yes, there was a lot. [2:25:20]. It started a little bit when I was at IBM. But of course, it was considering the work at IBM, it was really an extracurricular activity then and became much more important when I was at the SEI [2:25:40] and has continued into my retirement. When I look back at it, I am amazed at how much I was able to do.

Hellrigel:

Well, yes, I guess I saw one number stating nearly 200 papers [2:26:00] and invited lectures. You are on the lecture tour?

Mead:

I look at some of those papers and I would say when did I write that? Who were my coauthors? [Laughing].

IEEE

Hellrigel:

Then also your work with the various IEEE groups. Maybe conferences and also you became an IEEE Fellow. [2:26:20]

Mead:

Before that I was, there were conferences, but I was also involved in some of the magazines and journals, too.

Hellrigel:

Right. PUBS (IEEE Publications). Then we could talk about what it was like to be a fellow and now you’ve become a life fellow. [2:26:40] People have lots of jokes about that. Someone I talked to earlier today said they were at a conference, and someone read someone’s badge and said senior member or life member. How’d you get there? Then the other people at the table started to chuckle because the joke is you’ve got to live a long time [2:27:00] [Laughing].

Mead:

[Laughing].

Hellrigel:

You reach age sixty-five, add your years of membership and when you total 100, depending on your grade you are an IEEE Life Member, Life Senior Member, or Life Fellow.

Mead:

Somehow, I’ve become a dignitary in my old age. I still haven’t quite figured that out and how that happened.

Hellrigel:

Then the IEEE TC, the Technical Council is another [2:27:20] one of your IEEE volunteer work. That’s kind of a new initiative. Then you’ve been involved with WIE (Women in Engineering).

Mead:

Yes, a little bit.

Hellrigel:

We could talk about SEI and your professional activities if you think that works. [2:27:40]

Mead:

That will be fine. It all kind of blends together. It does. Even though I didn’t have a career plan, it does kind of build on what was there before. It makes sense in retrospect.

Hellrigel:

Right, and that will be the concluding [2:28:00] thing. If you had to do it again, any second guessing. Paths not taken. Things like that. Then sometimes people want to give advice but normally people are a little [2:28:20] … most people say just work hard and take advantage of every opportunity you get. But if you want to dwell on advice for the next STEM Generation or women in STEM.

Mead:

I’ve actually given some, because sometimes [2:28:40] they’ll come up to me and they’re at some kind of a crossroad in their career and they think that I’ve done something intentional or maybe they’ll think that it’s late to do something different because [2:29:00] it just seems like a foreign concept. For example, a young woman who had been in industry and maybe stepped away to have children.

Hellrigel:

Right.

Mead:

Perhaps they are, let’s say, around forty and they’re trying to decide should I make a jump [2:29:20] into academe. Is it too late to make a change? Or those kinds of things. I do get people asking me for advice.

Hellrigel:

Answering questions.

Mead:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

Then I don’t know if there’s going to be a topic that we didn’t discuss so if you want to think about [2:29:40] any topic that you think I have a hole in or a list of topics that if you’d like to bring something else up.

Mead:

Okay. If there’s a go-back, I'll think about that. But we’ve done… Well, we’ve done a lot I’d say.

Hellrigel:

Right, but I know [2:30:00] you know John [Impagliazzo] and his work in China and that must have been an adventure.

Mead:

[Laughing]

Hellrigel:

People you know, any memorable conferences, your experience with publications. But you’re also involved with ACM (Association for Computing Machinery). [2:30:20].

Mead:

Oh, yes.

Hellrigel:

It’s not just IEEE.

Mead:

Yes. Not as much. Not as much because ACM is more research-y and theoretical computer science. [2:30:40] I’ve certainly spent time there but not as much.

Hellrigel:

I think your two IEEE Societies right now are the IEEE Computer Society and the IEEE Reliability Society.

Mead:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

I don’t know if there were any IEEE Societies you were involved with earlier?

Mead:

Well, Computer Science was the original one [2:31:00]. I mean Computer Society.

Hellrigel:

Yes, then we’ll talk about awards.

Mead:

Sure.

Hellrigel:

And things like that. Yes. [2:31:20] If there’s any particular conference that you had fun going to or something like that. I had one person tell me that their experience, they were at a certain conference, I don’t know if it was Atlanta or where, and then 9/11 hit. They have some [2:31:40] external things that would end up having an impact that made a particular conference stick out.

Mead:

Well, we can talk about it a little more. I was on the way to the office at the SEI on 9/11 [2:32:00].

Hellrigel:

Oh, wow.

Mead:

At that point I heard it on the radio in the car. At that point, I didn’t realize what had happened. At first, I thought it was an accident. Then when I saw the second plane flew -- we had television. [2:32:20] Because the Computer Emergency Response Team being there in, CERT [phonetic]. But when I saw that second plane hit on TV, I'm like, wow, that was not an accident. Then [2:32:40] I actually got a phone call from the media asking me if the internet had been affected. I said, well, all of our staff was keeping an eye on things on TV and the internet seems fine. I don’t think that’s involved and it wasn’t. [2:33:00] Then we heard about the crash in Pennsylvania, and at first, I thought this can’t be related, it’s probably some small plane that went down coincidentally, but of course it was related. Long story short, about 11:00 o'clock since we were a Defense contract, they told all of us to [2:33:20] go home.

Hellrigel:

At 11:00 a.m.

Mead:

Yes. Then I worried about friends or colleagues who I knew who were at the Pentagon. But they were all okay. As it turned out the biggest impact was [2:33:40] friends of my sister in New Jersey. Because some of them actually commuted to the World Trade Towers and they had losses.

Hellrigel:

Wow. Yes. [2:34:00] I was teaching at Stevens Institute of Technology at the time.

Mead:

Well, there you are. Wow, right across the river from it.

Hellrigel:

Yes. Well, I actually saw the Towers collapse. My mom was alive at the time, and I came down stairs to the kitchen and we were watching the television. Exactly when the second plane hit, I said, mom, this is not an accident. [2:34:20] I hopped on the train to get to Hoboken because we still had work, not knowing what was going on. I was in the Meadowlands stopped on the New Jersey Transit Mainline Train. They stopped all the trains. Looking out the train window, I saw it come down. It pancaked down, and then poof, there was an upward shooting white cloud.

Mead:

Where were you living at the time?

Hellrigel:

[2:34:40] Passaic, New Jersey. During the summer of 2000, I moved home to take care of my Mama. I had been teaching at California State University, Chico but my dad got sick and passed and then Mama got sick, so I came home. I taught at New Jersey Institute of Technology for one year, and then I got the job at Stevens Institute of Technology. A few days after the Twin Towers collapsed, I took Mama to Hoboken for lunch and to look at the site from the New Jersey side. I have [2:35:00] photographs, actual photographs on film of the smoke that continued to escape from the burning debris. You could see that from Castle Point in Hoboken on the Stevens campus.

Mead:

Which of course was toxic.

Hellrigel:

Yes. [2:35:20] Yes. I was far enough from it. But a friend that lived south of Houston, actually has pieces of paper that she caught from the sky on 9/11. All the paper was burning and floating through the air. I am not sure, but the scraps look like paper from [2:35:40] a novel or printed book. She keeps them in a little box.

Mead:

Well, at a much earlier timeframe I was on the subway when they had the big blackout in New York City [in 1965].

Hellrigel:

In 1977, I was running a summer camp in Sussex County [2:36:00] in New Jersey. We had the kids out. It was for inner city kids. We had the kids out and you could see the glow from New York and then when we didn’t. That was another time when I said to my coworkers, I said something’s up.

Mead:

Well, I sat in the subway for two hours. [2:36:20] We were just outside the 4th Street Station. Nobody really knew what had happened. One guy came through the cars with a transistor radio, and he said the whole East Coast is out. Well, you know what New York City is like. We thought he was some kind of crackpot.

Hellrigel:

Right.

Mead:

[2:36:40] It turned out he was correct. Eventually, we got out in the 4th Street Station. Then the closest place I could get to would have been the Port Authority on 42nd Street to go home. We walked part way [2:37:00] and then somewhere in the 20s we caught a bus up to 42nd Street and walked across 42nd Street to get the bus. At that point in time, my dad was working third shift. The guy that he carpooled with had this idea [2:37:20] that he was going to go into work. Now I told you what he did. There would have been no work.

Hellrigel:

Yes. No electricity.

Mead:

No electricity. They were on the seventh or eighth floor of a building, and no elevators. This guy [2:37:40] says, well, I want to go in and punch the time clock.

Hellrigel:

And no air conditioning.

Mead:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

So, you’d be in a building baking because that was the summertime.

Mead:

It was yes. We dissuaded him from that.

Hellrigel:

Sometimes you just have to say, this is an unusual event, and stop. [2:38:00] Then after 9/11 the Stevens campus closed down for a little bit. Then about a year or so later, I attended a seminar at Stevens about the Twin Towers. The talked about [2:38:20] why the buildings fell.

Mead:

Oh, interesting.

Hellrigel:

The heat was unexpected because it could withstand heat but who would have thought there would be airplane fuel as the fuel that was being burnt. Then add all the paper and other contents in the buildings. [2:38:40] They thought at the time, and I think it still holds up was that the metal infrastructure melted due to the heat from the aviation fuel. That’s why it came down. They hadn’t engineered for a huge bomb filled with airplane fuel.

Mead:

Yes. We don’t do a very [2:39:00] good job of, I mean this latest boat crash in Baltimore is a good example.

Hellrigel:

Right.

Mead:

We don’t do a very good job of predicting failure modes.

Hellrigel:

Yes, the Francis Scott Key Bridge was hit by that huge cargo ship. I liked that bridge. When I was at the Smithsonian [2:39:20] on fellowship, I would go down via that bridge or the tunnel depending on which wasn’t backed up as much. That’s going to be a nightmare not only for the port, but commuting to and from Washington, D.C.

Mead:

Well, my nephew was on the way back to New Jersey [2:39:40] from Florida and stopped over at my place. He would normally be going that way. He was thinking of alternate routes.

Hellrigel:

Yes, that’s going to back things up and [2:40:00] of course as spring break and summer approach the trek down to Disney and points south is going to be all backed up. I'm glad your nephew is safe.

Mead:

Oh, yes, he’s fine. He was nowhere near it when it happened.

Hellrigel:

Who would have thought [2:40:20] even when that bridge was designed, they didn’t have seafaring ships that huge.

Mead:

Exactly.

Hellrigel:

Those are monsters. I’ve got photos of them. They’re just monsters. Basic physics, [2:40:40] two things can’t occupy the same space [Laughing].

Mead:

Well, digging out the port is only one part of the equation.

Hellrigel:

Right. Well, I guess you don’t have to worry about that from a security end, but we can pick up with that. I'm going to [2:41:00] end the recording right now.

THIS IS THE END OF PART ONE.

THIS IS THE BEGINNING OF PART TWO.

SEI (cont.)

Hellrigel:

[0:00:00] Today is April 19, 2024. This is Mary Ann Hellrigel of the IEEE History Center. We are recording part two of Dr. Nancy Mead’s oral history. She’s a [0:00:20] 2006 IEEE Fellow and now a Life Fellow. She’s a Fellow of the Software Engineering Institute, Lero, the Irish Software Research Center and she is the recipient of many awards.

Today, I thought we’d start with your work at SEI, the Software [0:00:40] Engineering Institute. I think we briefly talked about it in part one. You were Director of Education at SEI from 1991 to 1994. Prior to that you were Senior Technical Staff at IBM Federal Systems. We’ll get started there [0:01:00] if you don’t mind.

Mead:

Sure. My interest in education goes back a long way. I taught as an adjunct at various universities. Throughout most of my career depending on where I lived, [0:01:20], of course, and at IBM I was manager of the Software Engineering Education Group during part of my tenure there. That group provided education for all the software engineers [0:01:40] in the Federal Systems Division.

Hellrigel:

Was this to update them on the newest trends in the field?

Mead:

I may have already discussed this, it started with Harlan Mills convincing the then division president [0:02:00] that the division should adopt structured programming and structured design methods. This was a pretty big commitment because it involved taking people out of the workforce [0:02:20] basically for two to three weeks to train them in these newer methods. Subsequently other courses were added. One addressing management, one addressing concurrent design, and then they brought in some university faculty to give courses [0:02:40] as well. At a later time, IBM established its own Software Engineer Institute at the corporate level to do this training. But Federal Systems was the first. I was managing the [0:03:00] group of ten instructors in Federal Systems. When I left there, it was kind of natural. When I joined the Software Engineering Institute to get back into education again, and shortly after I joined, I was asked to be Director of Software Engineering [0:03:20] Education there for a larger audience in a way because our target audience was nationwide. As opposed to corporate. Maybe it’s a larger audience, maybe it’s a smaller audience: it depends upon your viewpoint.

Hellrigel:

[0:03:40] [Laughing]. When you were working and you had a team of ten instructors, they would bring people to your institute at IBM, or did you travel?

Mead:

It was both. Initially they brought people into Federal Systems Division [0:04:00] Headquarters in Bethesda. I actually went there when I was being trained. Subsequently when I was managing it, we went to the division locations. The local ones, of course, would be in Maryland and Virginia but there was also [0:04:20] Owego, New York, Westlake, California, Houston and… others here and there. But since it was Federal Systems those were all based in the United States.

Hellrigel:

When you joined [0:04:40] SEI, your audiences -- SEI is providing instructor education to clients?

Mead:

What we did initially, and that was kind of about the time that I joined, we started the Master of Software [0:05:00] Engineering at Carnegie Mellon. It wasn’t the first in the nation, but it was among the early ones. Those course offerings were recorded on video and distributed under license to other universities [0:05:20] so that their faculty could facilitate the videos for their individual audience. Typically, the other faculty might use those videos as a resource, [0:05:40] sometimes just for themselves and other times with students, until they felt comfortable developing their own material. We had at the same time a continuing education version of those video courses that was videotaped separately [0:06:00] and the course offerings were slightly different as well because those were training courses for a practitioner audience so two different audiences. That became a second level organization. [0:06:20] Most of the time I had three teams with their own supervisors reporting to me during that time period from 1991 to actually 1995 I think.

Hellrigel:

You had three teams, so you were managing [0:06:40] quite a big crew.

Mead:

I think there were about twenty of us. It was an academic faculty group and a continuing education group and then we had people who specialized in instructional design [0:07:00] that were kind of a third group.

Hellrigel:

Wow.

Mead:

They had a different background, but yes, it was about twenty people. Ultimately, since this was all government funding, different priorities [0:07:20] came along and so that focus ended at the SEI and that was the time point at which I transitioned into cybersecurity.

Hellrigel:

When you’re at Carnegie Mellon, Carnegie Mellon’s emerged as a center for computer [0:07:40] education. Like big projects going on. This is where you also had the opportunity to teach.

Mead:

I taught in, again, as an adjunct, in the School of Computer Science. There was a [0:08:00] Real Time Systems course that I taught. Later on, I taught a course in Cybersecurity Software Engineering. There were several of us who designed or helped to design a Cybersecurity Master’s Degree Program [0:08:20] in the Heinz School for Public Policy, which of course is also part of Carnegie Mellon

Hellrigel:

Yes, but two distinctly different -- like IT oriented and policy oriented: how to get policy people to understand how to protect [0:08:40] their infrastructure?

Mead:

Well, actually it was more of an IT degree in the School of Computer Science it was in the context of software engineering.

Hellrigel:

Did you enjoy [0:09:00] this teaching?

Mead:

Yes. The only thing I didn’t like was that typically the course offerings, especially at Heinz, were once a week for almost three hours. [0:09:20]

Hellrigel:

Seminar style.

Mead:

Yes. That was pretty intense. In the School of Computer Science, in a way it was easier because it was two sessions a week of one hour and twenty minutes. Those were daytime, [0:09:40] so it was easier as long as I was working at the SEI full time on site. Once I started to work from home, of course, all those things became much more difficult because then it was a matter of [0:10:00] having to make a special trip just to teach a class.

Hellrigel:

Right, because this is in the mid or early 1990s and there’s no Zoom or Webex, so you had to physically be there.

Mead:

Absolutely.

Hellrigel:

Back in the day they could have had distance learning [0:10:20] but you’d have to be in a TV studio with a setup.

Mead:

We did actually have some distance learning. It was with Colorado Tech. We had a distance course with [0:10:40] the University in Florida. It was very challenging because we didn’t, or I should say, I didn’t meet the students until the very end of the course. I had a chance to go down there in person. But up until then I was at a distance with [0:11:00] video that was not that great. Without any professional support other than the video connection so that kind of presentation format is not ideal. [0:11:20]

Hellrigel:

Right. No, it’s a one-way video. They could see you and usually you can’t see them. They could do it but that’s for --

Mead:

Well, I could see a room full of people but not well enough to distinguish their faces.

Hellrigel:

Then they’re going to make a shift. [0:11:40] Then I guess 1995 you’re going to leave? You become more involved in cybersecurity?

Mead:

That’s right. That was a research project where we wanted to take advantage of our background in software engineering because we [0:12:00] could see that nobody was paying attention to cybersecurity during software development. The conferences that were done by cybersecurity specialists and software engineering specialists had no connection [0:12:20] whatsoever.

Hellrigel:

Oh, so the security people and the computer specialists weren’t talking to each other.

Mead:

They didn’t talk to each other. They didn’t go to each other’s conferences.

Hellrigel:

Do you then see yourself as a bridge between the two or did you go to the two [0:12:40] sets of conferences?

Mead:

We went to the two separate conferences and tried to bridge that gap. We also had folks who took the initiative of holding workshops. That would be for that joint audience. [0:13:00] I wasn’t the one who ran those workshops, but I did participate in them, and we presented short papers, that kind of thing.

Hellrigel:

Which conference did you attend from the computer end? Like an annual conference?

Mead:

[0:13:20] From the software engineering side, let me think about this. My work was in Requirements Engineering. I did research in Cybersecurity Requirements Engineering [0:13:40] and developed methods that were piloted which are referenced quite a bit in the literature. Then in addition to presenting at conferences, I ran around and gave seminars and taught courses. [0:14:00] One of the ones that was interesting: I actually had a group of faculty come over from Taiwan. I did a train the trainer with them. They then translated, with permission of course, translated my course materials [0:14:20] into Chinese so that they could deliver it. In a similar fashion, I went to Japan., did some seminars, and coauthored a paper that was translated into Japanese. [0:14:40] A group of us later on in the early 2000s, I think 2008, coauthored a book that was translated into other languages. It was very interesting and enjoyable [0:15:00] work in that timeframe. We kind of ping ponged around between technology, education, and publishing.

Hellrigel:

I see from a resume that I sort of pulled together that in 2008 [0:15:20] you had Software Security Engineering, a Guide for Managers.

Mead:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

That’s the one that’s translated.

Mead:

Yes. That was the first one. Then there was a second one. I think 2015 or 2016. I don’t know if that got translated [0:15:40] or not. That ended up being an eBook, so it did get a fairly wide distribution. Then I wrote a number of book chapters as well.

Hellrigel:

Right. I think the 2016 book you wrote with Carol Woody?

Mead:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

It’s Cybersecurity Engineering, [0:16:00] a Practical Approach for Systems and Software Assurance by Addison Wesley Professional. That’s the eBook. So, you published with Addison. I see you’ve done some chapters in cybersecurity and integrating it into software engineering. So, your career [0:16:20] sort of bridges that: trying to get the security into the education end.

Mead:

Yes. One of the interesting things with the SEI was that they had an agreement with Addison Wesley to produce a series of SEI books. [0:16:40] We got some release time, and it was really never enough, but we did get release time to work on the books. We got some really good support from our editorial staff. [0:17:00] But we didn’t own the copyright. SEI shared the copyright with Addison Wesley. It was an interesting arrangement and one that I think everybody liked. They may still have [0:17:20] such an arrangement. I don’t know. I haven’t kept up with it.

Hellrigel:

Then these publications would be the ones that you would use in your courses.

Mead:

Yes. Sometimes like with any faculty, sometimes the course came first and then the publication [0:17:40] or vice versa.

Hellrigel:

Right. Many people I’ve spoken with said they didn’t have a course book specifically focused on what they wanted to teach so over the years or sometimes quite quickly they put together their own textbook.

Mead:

In our area, lots of times, [0:18:00] we would be teaching without a textbook, just using papers. Ultimately, if you had the opportunity to create a book, that was a good thing.

Hellrigel:

Papers from professional journals.

Mead:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

[0:18:20] When you used papers, are these graduate or undergraduate courses?

Mead:

I only taught graduate level courses. There are undergraduate programs in cybersecurity. [0:18:40] At least at that time there weren’t any being offered at Carnegie Mellon that I know of.

Hellrigel:

Yes. Cyber security became very popular around 2000-2002? Not that the World Trade Center but when the universities were always teaching [0:19:00] they then developed a minor and then a major in cybersecurity that if I remember correctly kind of bridged computer science, computer engineering, and the business school.

Mead:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

Mathematics.

Mead:

Yes. That makes sense because lots of times they had [0:19:20] different universities that had trouble deciding where to place these programs.

Hellrigel:

Right. Wanting to go in a new direction without hiring specifically new faculty so they created a joint venture between the schools. Then of course after 9/11 [0:19:40] then cybersecurity became even more important. I don’t know if there was more funding or what, but it seems the program blossomed.

Mead:

When I started working in the field in 1995, nobody knew what I was talking about [Laughing].

Hellrigel:

Well, what [0:20:00] did they --

Mead:

Other than the people who were already working in it. But that changed pretty quickly.

Hellrigel:

How did you explain it to people that didn’t know what you were talking about?

Mead:

[Laughing].

Hellrigel:

What did you tell them you did?

Mead:

To tell you the truth, I don’t remember because [0:20:20] that’s a problem I had my entire career is trying to explain, back in the day, what software development was.

Hellrigel:

Oh, I think people know what they do but it’s invisible. So they know that there's something [0:20:40] going on in that machine that allows them to get money out of the ATM or that allows them to purchase an airline ticket. Security they’ll think of when they get hacked.

Mead:

Yes, exactly. I find it really interesting. [0:21:00] Of course, having worked with computing all my life, I see it in a way from the machine level. I have friends [0:21:20] who see it only from a user perspective.

Hellrigel:

How do you see it?

Mead:

Is probably the best way to put it.

Hellrigel:

How do you see it from the machine level? Like what?

Mead:

Well, I said when I started working, I was coding in machine code. We were using IBM Job Control Language. [0:21:40] So, when Apple came along with a much more comfortable user interface for people who weren’t computing experts… my friends [0:22:00] who use any kind of applications think that’s a wonderful interface. But for me, it never felt natural because I always wanted to know what was really happening.

Hellrigel:

You wanted to see the [0:22:20] code. They’re content with just pushing an icon.

Mead:

Right. Well, also if I'm doing something, I don’t necessarily want to see the code, but I want to get to it in a deeper way. [0:22:40] What they’ll do is they might have, let’s say, a few settings that they’ve memorized. So, they can navigate those settings. Well, if I'm looking at settings, I'm looking at the settings in much more depth.

Hellrigel:

[0:23:00] Okay, the cybersecurity. What attracted you to cybersecurity?

Mead:

Well, in some regards, my entire career has been kind of accidental. [0:23:20] Huh. I say that in that I didn’t have a grand plan when I started out for sure. What we did, there were a group of us in software engineering and this [0:23:40] is a small number of people: three of us in software engineering and three in cybersecurity, who decided to do some experimental research together, just to see if we had mutual interests. [0:24:00] The results of those initial ventures were so exciting we felt like we’d made progress, that we decided to go in that direction.

Hellrigel:

Who are you working with, if you recall?

Mead:

Oh, let’s see. Tom Longstaff. This was [0:24:20] at the SEI. Tom Longstaff, Rick Linger, Howard Lipson, David Fisher, [and Bob Ellison, so] that’s four. [0:24:40]

Hellrigel:

These are right at SEI, and then I guess over the years you developed a relationship with other researchers, like your coauthors. [0:25:00]

Mead:

Oh, for sure. Well, the entire Cybersecurity Group at the SEI at that time was somewhere between twenty and thirty people, I would say. Now, [0:25:20] it’s probably on the order of 300 people, maybe more.

Hellrigel:

Wow. That’s the expanding market for it.

Mead:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

Need for it.

Mead:

Definitely. It became very important. It went from being a kind of a small group [0:25:40] at the SEI that they decided to put there after the Morris Worm incident. To a much bigger group of interest to the sponsor who was, of course, always a federal [0:26:00] sponsor.

Hellrigel:

Right. Finance and other things. Could you briefly give a public description of the Morris Worm incident? In case somebody reads this, that was embedded and you clicked on something and then it infected your computer. [0:26:20]

Mead:

Well, see that was before I was actually part of the group. But Morris was the name of the person who did it.

Hellrigel:

But that was what you were trying to protect against?

Mead:

It was that kind of that kind of hack.

Hellrigel:

Infiltration. [0:26:40]

Mead:

He was at a university at the time, and I believe he was from a very intellectual family. But it was something on the internet that had never taken place because the internet was [0:27:00] developed by a set of trusted people for a smaller audience.

Hellrigel:

Yes, the unintended consequences of people who were either trying to just do it for the game of it or steal financial resources.

Mead:

At that time, I don’t [0:27:20] think finance was one of the motivations. I don’t know, but I suspect it was more let me try this and see if I can do it.

Hellrigel:

Oh, okay. It’s sort of your reputation for coding. That you could [0:27:40] be the wizard.

Mead:

[0:28:00] The director of that group Rich Pethia said that he was given the job because he wasn’t in the office that day. [Laughing]

Hellrigel:

Oh, to discover what was going on.

Mead:

Right.

Hellrigel:

Did the rest of you, maybe chip in and help him [0:28:20] a bit or?

Mead:

Well, once again, I wasn’t in the group at the time.

Hellrigel:

Oh, okay.

Mead:

I'm not sure exactly how that sequence of events went.

Hellrigel:

Right. Yes. I guess who knows what can happen now with people working from home what you’ll get assigned.

Mead:

[0:28:40] Well, you don’t even know where they are most of the time.

Hellrigel:

True. True.

Mead:

Or who they are.

Hellrigel:

It’s become so complex with different servers and it’s not the proper term but with VPNs you could [0:29:00] ghost things and hide where you’re coming from.

Mead:

Well, it’s one of the consequences. Anonymity, net anonymity has some benefits but something that isn’t a benefit is that if you’re a hacker it is pretty easy to hide. [0:29:20]

Hellrigel:

True. With your work at cybersecurity I know you’ve published 150 or more papers and such. Are you getting more involved with invited talks? I know that’s become an increasingly big part of your career. Invited presentations [0:29:40] and that.

Mead:

Well, that kind of gets into the professional society [Laughing] aspect.

Hellrigel:

We could jump to that. I don’t know if you wanted to say anything more about your work in cybersecurity.

Mead:

Well, it’s all kind of connected in a way. [0:30:10] I could say right now I'm a Distinguished Visitor with IEEE. I'm generally asked to talk about cybersecurity when I'm invited to give one of those talks.

Hellrigel:

Right, the Distinguished Visiting [0:30:20] Lecturer at IEEE is with the IEEE Computer Society?

Mead:

Yes. I also belong to the [IEEE] Reliability Society, but as you know there’s an exchange [0:30:40] program with ACM. Now. Virtually all of those talks have been online because I no sooner started doing that than we had the shutdown. During the [0:31:00] pandemic and now it’s more convenient for me to continue to do them online that particular set of talks.

Hellrigel:

They mostly focus on the cybersecurity.

Mead:

That’s what people want to hear about.

Hellrigel:

[0:31:20] The exchange program with the Association of Computer Machinery, how did you become involved with this exchange? Are you a member of that society also?

Mead:

Yes, yes, actually I think I joined the ACM before I joined [0:31:40] IEEE. That was back in the 1980s. At least, when I first started working in technology, I joined both groups at that time. [I’m a Distinguished Educator with ACM.]

Hellrigel:

Are you giving these talks globally or mostly to U.S. customers? [0:32:00]

Mead:

A lot of them are global because the travel is not that easy. I’ve given some in the Middle East, some in Asia, some in Europe, and some in the United States. [0:32:20].

Hellrigel:

Out of this work that you’re doing, I guess, when do you step away from full employment? Because it seems that you’re still beyond busy. You leave SEI. [0:32:40] You worked for IBM, with Chase, IBM, SEI, and then do you create a consulting company?

Mead:

Well, sort of. I don’t actually [0:33:00] have a company. I work as a consultant at times. Usually, it’s when somebody invites me. I'm not running around and promoting myself [0:33:20] or going to events specifically to promote myself. People invite me just because they either find out about me or they know about my work.

Hellrigel:

You leave SEI around 1995 and is that when you become [0:33:40]…?

Mead:

Oh, no, all that work was still at the SEI.

Hellrigel:

Oh. Okay. You just work from home more.

Mead:

Right. Well, I started to work from home more in the early 2000s. [0:34:00] In 2004, I was working almost entirely from home which was fine because I was working with the same team that I had always worked with.

Hellrigel:

You would travel occasionally to meet with them? [0:34:20].

Mead:

Yes. Well, I wasn’t there full time. I was 50/50 between South Carolina and Pennsylvania. But I didn’t go into the office every day, even when I was in Pennsylvania because by then I didn’t have an office. [0:34:40] [Laughing]

Hellrigel:

No office. Was that common? Did other people did that, too?

Mead:

Not many in that timeframe. There were a few people like myself. Then there were people who mostly worked at customer locations, so they were hardly ever in [0:35:00] the office. But there weren’t that many people who did it. The ones who did were mostly senior people like myself. It wasn’t really commonplace. But what I did was in 2016 [0:35:20], I started thinking about retiring and I reduced my work to part time. Then in 2018 I retired from the SEI altogether but continued as adjunct faculty [0:35:40] at the School of Computer Science where I teach and I still do.

Hellrigel:

So, you’re not really retired, just semi-retired.

Mead:

[Laughing]. Now, for the most part, I call it working for free because I'm doing so much volunteer work. [0:36:00]

Hellrigel:

True.

Mead:

But that’s it. That’s a separate issue.

Hellrigel:

Then you are at SEI from about 1991 to 2018, so that’s almost thirty years.

Mead:

Yes. A long time.

Hellrigel:

Did you enjoy your [0:36:20] work at SEI?

Mead:

Yes, very much, otherwise I wouldn’t have stayed there that long. My husband had retired in 1997, so I could have worked anywhere at that point. In fact, even when we joined the SEI [0:36:40] it was initially work that I was interested in and then there was work that he was interested in as well.

Hellrigel:

[0:37:00] Most of the time when I talk to people, they say they become more involved in their societies when they’ve retired, and like yourself, it just becomes unpaid full-time activities. [Laughing]

Mead:

Well, there is one thing that’s worth mentioning. It wasn’t so much the case [0:37:20] at IBM, but at the SEI involvement in leadership in professional societies was very important.

Hellrigel:

I'll be the village idiot. In what way or why did they permit professional activities? [0:37:40]

Mead:

Well, they wanted to be noted for technical leadership, so being from professional societies was one way of demonstrating it. [0:38:00] One example, before me, was Mario Barbacci was President of the [IEEE] Computer Society. Probably every [0:38:20] SEI director became an IEEE Fellow. When I became an IEEE Fellow that was a big deal there.

Hellrigel:

You became a fellow in [0:38:40] 2006 I believe?

Mead:

Right.

Hellrigel:

How did you find out? I think we talked maybe a bit, but did you get an email or someone phone you up to say you’ve become a Fellow?

Mead:

I think I got a phone call. [0:39:00] But my memory is a little faulty on that. The person who nominated me was Angel Jordan who had been Provost at Carnegie Mellon. He was actually involved in the original proposal for the Software Engineering Institute, [0:39:20] so he was kind of a mentor for me.

Hellrigel:

[0:39:40] He became a mentor and then put together the proposal. Do they let you know they’re proposing you or is it a secret?

Mead:

Well, they almost have to let you know because they don’t -- it’s not required [0:40:00] but if you’re going to write a really strong proposal, you need a lot of information. You also need some letters of support to go with it. So generally, yes. The same was the case [0:40:20], it was actual Carol Woody who nominated me to be an SEI Fellow which is in some regards the same, at least at the SEI it was a bigger deal because in the history of the SEI there have only been eight fellows.

Hellrigel:

Wow. [0:40:40]

Mead:

It’s a very small group. I became a Distinguished Member of the ACM, but you can self-nominate for that. That’s not as consequential as being a Fellow.

Hellrigel:

But going back to SEI, you’re [0:41:00] an employee and then you become a Fellow.

Mead:

Well, the Fellow is an honorary title. It’s not a position. I still retain that title even though I'm retired.

Hellrigel:

Did your job change any at SEI after you became a Fellow?

Mead:

[0:41:20] Yes and no. Well, that was how I got to write the second book.

Hellrigel:

Oh, leave time.

Mead:

To be able do some interesting research that wasn’t funded because with the position [0:41:40] came some funding.

Hellrigel:

Did you get to select people to work with you on the book or the research?

Mead:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

Is this the book that you [0:42:00] wrote with --?

Mead:

With Carol.

Hellrigel:

She’s been a long-term member of SEI?

Mead:

I'm thinking she joined in the early 2000s. We didn’t work together at the time. That was [0:42:20] much later when she and I started to work together. I don’t know the exact date.

Hellrigel:

Do you have any favorite projects you worked on at SEI? I mean the books were certainly culminations.

Mead:

[0:42:40] Well, I would say there were two things. One, the Software Engineering Education. There were a couple of things that I was [0:43:00] particularly happy with. One was some of the courses that we developed and then there was work that I did in Requirements Engineering. [0:43:20] Then in cybersecurity we did a lot of unique work. There was research and then we also developed a website for the Department of Homeland Security [0:43:40] to collect technical information on cybersecurity. It was called Building Security and that wasn’t available elsewhere. That was a public website. It's still out there but it’s [0:44:00] more of a repository now. I don’t think anything’s been added to it in a number of years. We did some really interesting work with the Department of Homeland Security when they were first established, [including the software assurance curriculum project, a major curriculum development effort related to Cybersecurity, and I was PI for SQUARE, a security requirements engineering method.]

Hellrigel:

The project, at one [0:44:20] point, there was a lot of talk about pulling all the data into one database because FBI, CIA -- was that kind of the goal of this project with the website?

Mead:

No, that was a different project. Unfortunately, well, one of the things they wanted to do [0:44:40] was to collect incident data and analyze it. Unfortunately, it wasn’t collected in a way to make it easy to analyze. Initially they did telephone calls with people, and they captured the gist [0:45:00] of the phone call in prose. So, you would have had to do some kind of machine analysis to categorize these things and be able to extract any information from them.

Hellrigel:

Right, they just needed more of a standard way to [0:45:20] collect the info. A category. Wow

Mead:

Then every organization that was doing it would have to collect it in the same way. It’s not dissimilar to the problem we have today with medical records.

Hellrigel:

Standardization. [0:45:40]

Mead:

Yes. Yes, we think about it after the fact.

Hellrigel:

That’s a challenge for any data collecting: crime or other instances, if people label it differently or categorize it differently then you can’t conglomerate it. [0:46:00] Then you can’t use the data because the data means so many different things to different projects.

Mead:

Right. Lots of times you depend on volunteers. The volunteers, even if you’re doing something like identifying key words. [0:46:20] They may not identify -- they may not use key words in the same way from one person to the next.

Hellrigel:

That’s probably a challenge for people doing big data research. The big data people bring in all this kind of data but if it’s [0:46:40] sort of not speaking the same language, not a computer language, but a classification language, then how do you create numbers that you can interchange. I don’t know.

Mead:

That’s a problem with our large language models, too, I might add.

Hellrigel:

I guess [0:47:00] researchers like you find that frustrating that you developed this and then when it’s implemented it’s not used as efficiently as you had intended?

Mead:

I'm kind of a fanatic when it comes to definitions. Almost every project that I’ve worked on, I wanted to establish definitions from [0:47:20] the beginning. But lots of times, people assume that they all mean the same thing and they don’t.

Hellrigel:

Yes, the thesaurus that people would have to use was that one you [0:47:40] created. I guess Homeland Security at one point had but probably still has a great deal of funding.

Mead:

I imagine they do. I haven’t since I retired, I haven’t really kept up and I'm not sure where [0:48:00] CISA resides.

Hellrigel:

Did you do any other projects for, say, the Department of Defense?

Mead:

We did do some. We did architecture analyses: looking at software architectures for [0:48:20] different government organizations. In fact, one of them was actually for the National Institutes of Health. We did one for the Army, one for the Air Force. It wasn’t really consistent because we were looking for pilot projects. [0:48:40] The best audience would be an organization that was in a position to do a pilot with us.

Hellrigel:

It’s a long way from undergraduate degree in mathematics and [0:49:00] did you ever think you would be so -- what did you think you were going to do when you came out of undergraduate? You become so entrenched in computers and teaching and cybersecurity.

Mead:

[Laughing] Actually, I thought when I was working on my [0:49:20] Ph.D. in math I thought I would be doing more with algorithms. But by the time I finished I realized that that wasn’t so much my interest anymore.

Hellrigel:

When you’re doing this kind of work [0:49:40] you’ve become, I don’t know if we should make the jump to societies, did you want to add anything about employment?

Mead:

I think we really covered a lot so, yes, let’s jump to societies.

ACM

Hellrigel:

Should we start with IEEE first or do you want to start with [0:50:00] ACM? Which makes most sense for you?

Mead:

Well, chronologically ACM makes more sense.

Hellrigel:

Then let’s go there.

Mead:

At the time, I was working for Jean Sammet who had been the President of [0:50:20] the ACM. She encouraged everybody on her staff to join. It’s not surprising. There were two things that I did, if I remember correctly. I think I was on the [0:50:40] editorial staff for the Annals of Software Engineering. Or maybe it’s Annals -- oh, no, it was Annals of History of Computing.

Hellrigel:

Oh, the IEEE. Or is that ACM? I think that’s an IEEE [0:51:00].

Mead:

Then I'm fuzzy on that.

Hellrigel:

But when you’re working for Jean, you’re working at IBM?

Mead:

Yes. I believe that was my first job at Federal Systems Headquarters before I became manager of the Education Program for the Division. [0:51:20] Then the other thing that I did, this was kind of unique. They got interested in the Software Patent Office. They had an advisory board that I was on. Then Jean’s particular interest was in Ada, the programing [0:51:40] language. I did some work, not on the programming language, but on Ada as a design language.

Hellrigel:

When you’re involved in ACM, are you going to conferences? What are you doing?

Mead:

[0:52:00] I started going to some conferences. The first ones that I went to were actually to present my Ph.D. research. Then they were smaller conferences, [0:52:20] not the big conferences that we think of these days. Also, one of my early publications was in the IBM Systems Journal which was pretty highly respected in that timeframe. [0:52:40]

Hellrigel:

Did you get release time to go to these conferences?

Mead:

Yes. Oh, that was part of the job.

Hellrigel:

Did they pay your annual dues?

Mead:

No.

Hellrigel:

Did they pay for you to go to the conferences or your expenses? [0:53:00].

Mead:

Yes, travel expenses were covered, but not dues. In fact, that’s been pretty consistent throughout my career. The other thing that’s not really covered is the amount of time you spent writing papers.

Hellrigel:

Right, [0:53:20] the extra time -- you’re not 9:00 to 5:00.

Mead:

Yes, invariably, you’re doing a lot of that on your own time whether or not it’s recognized. I did get very good support from IBM when I was working on my Ph.D. though.

Hellrigel:

Because you were working on the Ph.D. while working. [0:53:40]

Mead:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

You had mentioned that there was release time for that and they covered the tuition?

Mead:

Tuition, books, fees. [0:54:00] I can’t remember the name of the program, but if you were doing graduate work in a field of interest to them, then you could apply for that program.

Hellrigel:

Was it a popular program with employees?

Mead:

[0:54:20] Maybe at the master’s level, but there were fewer at the Ph.D. level because most of the positions at IBM didn’t call for a Ph.D. They also had some [0:54:40] people who were paid to go to school full time. But that would only be if they were working on something of immediate interest to the company. In my timeframe that would have been more hardware or serious engineering related [0:55:00] rather than software. Because software was seen as incidental to the entire [crosstalk] --

Hellrigel:

Incidental, this is when they’re designing the personal computers and desktops?

Mead:

Well, that was later.

Hellrigel:

Oh, okay.

Mead:

Yes. That was kind of a [0:55:20] small organization working on a PC. It wasn’t a mainstream group.

Hellrigel:

It’s still the focus on business machinery.

Mead:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

The big systems.

Mead:

Yep. I don’t know but I understand that IBM had a chance [0:55:40] to have a 10 percent interest in Microsoft.

Hellrigel:

Wow.

Mead:

They didn’t come to an agreement. It never happened.

Hellrigel:

I guess in retrospect decisions look either silly or, or phenomenal [Laughing].

Mead:

Yes, [0:56:00] it’s hard, it’s kind of an unknown. In fact, that was way above my pay grade as they say.

Hellrigel:

As they say. Is there any pressure on you to publish or be active? Did it factor into pay raises and then advancement, career advancement? [0:56:20]

Mead:

Not directly. I would say that it put me in a position to do more of the work that I wanted to do.

Hellrigel:

Differently trained or better trained. Because at universities, it’s the old publish or perish.

Mead:

Right. Yes, no, it wasn’t [0:56:40] so much at IBM. In fact, one of the best mathematicians who I knew at IBM had a bachelor’s degree and that was it.

Hellrigel:

Oh. Okay.

Mead:

Nobody [0:57:00] really cared because he was doing great algorithm work.

Hellrigel:

At ACM, that professional society, were they mostly industry people or a mix of academic industry?

Mead:

[0:57:20] At that time, ACM tended to be more academic, and IEEE was more industry.

Hellrigel:

Really? Oh, that’s cool. I mean the people now might see the difference. I don’t know. Following trends, I need a database and check off ACM, IEEE [0:57:40], both. With ACM, that’s your first. Then why jump and include IEEE?

Mead:

I think I was working with Terry Baker and [0:58:00] IEEE Software was about to start publication. He encouraged me to join to start getting this great new magazine. A number of us [0:58:20] joined n that timeframe back in the I'm pretty sure it was in the 1980s.

Hellrigel:

The 1980s. This is after IEEE formed. IEEE was created in 1963. [0:58:40]

Mead:

Yes, long after that.

IEEE (cont.)

Hellrigel:

Long after. How would you describe your interaction with IEEE then? You join it to get access to the new magazine.

Mead:

Well, that followed kind of an interesting sequence. In that timeframe [0:59:00] Alan Davis in Colorado was the editor-in-chief and he had a column. Maybe it was before he was editor-in-chief. I think maybe Carl Chang was editor-in-chief at that time. [0:59:20] Al had a column where he posed a question about a job that he had where he disagreed with his manager on whether he should inform his customer of some particular issue that they were [0:59:40] having. He asked the readers to tell him what they thought he should do. I sent a reply in that he liked. I didn’t know him at all. Subsequent to that, he invited me to be on the IEEE [1:00:00] Software editorial board. I did that for a few years. Well, more than a few probably. Then IEEE Software also had an industry advisory board so when I stopped [1:00:20] being on the editorial board I was on the industry advisory board. Also, for a few years. Then I was on the founding taskforce for IEEE Security and Privacy. I had a column there for a while with Gary McGraw [1:00:40]. Again, I was at that point, I'm at the SEI. When the Education Program was disbanded, one of the residual pieces was a conference that we had been running [1:01:00]. I realized that that the conference ran at a loss because it was funded basically by the SEI. When I realized that that funding was going to go away, I did two things. One was to set the conference [1:01:20] up for a transition to IEEE sponsorship. The other was to establish a working group, an ad hoc working group on software engineering education. What we did was the working group would meet twice a year [1:01:40] and I basically provided lunches and got somebody to provide room space. I used to joke that I could get people to work with me if I gave them lunch.

Hellrigel:

[Laughing] Yes. Feed them.

Mead:

But in any case, we kept that going for [1:02:00] quite a while and did some very good curriculum work, and work on the software engineering body of knowledge SWEBOK and other efforts with the individual members interpreting the data, so that was a big… [1:02:20] well, it wasn’t an IEEE activity per se, but it was all related.

Hellrigel:

Now the working group, did it meet in conjunction with a conference or were these just people you knew, and you’d get together?

Mead:

Once a year we met at the [1:02:40] Conference on Software Engineering Education and Training which by then was an IEEE conference.

Hellrigel:

That’s the conference you brought in.

Mead:

Wherever the conference was being held. I would persuade some university department head or faculty member to make space available [1:03:00] to us and provide refreshments so that we could meet for the next day or two after the conference or before the conference. Then alternatively [1:03:20] I would have a second meeting. I can’t remember if we would meet at the SEI or elsewhere. But we would have a second meeting so that we were basically meeting every six months and I chaired that group. [1:03:40]

Hellrigel:

How many people were in this group? Approximately, six, ten?

Mead:

Well, again, they were volunteers so it kind of went up and down. Generally, between fifteen and twenty-five, I would say. With a larger mailing list. [1:04:00]

Hellrigel:

Is this where you crossed path with John Impagliazzo?

Mead:

I did first meet John [Impagliazzo] at one of those conferences. I think it was when we were in Atlanta. He might have been [1:04:20] there for a SIGCSE conference because the SIGCSE and the CSEET [phonetic] were collocated.

Hellrigel:

SIGCSE means?

Mead:

ACM Special Interest Group in Computer [1:04:40] Science Education. They had their own conferences and occasionally we collocated with them. We were meeting at Georgia Tech if I recall. We had a dinner [1:05:00] to talk about software engineering education. I don’t remember. John was active in the Computer Science Accreditation Board. I think he coerced me into joining [1:05:20] that. They later merged with ABET.

Hellrigel:

That’s what I was going to say.

Mead:

Engineering Accreditation [1:05:40] but at the time they were two separate groups. I'm thinking that was at John’s [John Impagliazzo] instigation. But in any case, that’s where we first met. Talked about software engineering and degrees. Their content versus computer science degrees. [1:06:00].

Hellrigel:

Were you active then reviewing computer science curriculum? I know that’s one of John’s --

Mead:

I did. I was a visitor, so we visited universities to review what they were doing. That was really a labor of love because it usually meant [1:06:20] traveling on the weekend, getting the cheapest airfare available, and staying at so-so hotels.

Hellrigel:

Motels [Laughing].

Mead:

In one case [1:06:40] visiting a university when the buildings had the air conditioning turned off because they were saving money on the weekend.

Hellrigel:

Exactly.

Mead:

[Laughing].

Hellrigel:

You did that for a while?

Mead:

I did it for a while and [1:07:00] I think so that would have been when I was in management. Ultimately, I recommended someone on my staff to do it. Because it just put me in an overload.

Hellrigel:

Management at SEI?

Mead:

Yes. [1:07:20] Correct.

Hellrigel:

But you got to see or maybe have an impact on curriculum at the undergraduate and graduate level by advising them on what they should do?

Mead:

Oh, for sure.

Hellrigel:

[1:07:40] So that kept you busy on weekends. Then you have some ACM conferences to go to. Then you started to become more active in IEEE with working groups. Which IEEE conferences did you go to?

Mead:

[1:08:00] I came to L.A. ICSE which of course was a joint conference.

Hellrigel:

What does that stand for?

Mead:

International Conference on Software Engineering. The two conferences that I was most involved with were the Conference on Software Engineering Education and Training for which I was the initial steering committee chair. Around 1994 or 1995 I started attending the Requirements Engineering [1:08:40] conferences. There were two of them. One was called Requirements Engineering Symposium. The other one was called the International Conference on Requirements Engineering. They were both IEEE [1:09:00] sponsored and they ran in alternate years. Ultimately, it became clear that it was too much of an administrative burden to run two sets of conferences with their associated committees. [1:09:20] There was a lot of audience overlap. At that point I was on the steering committee for the International Conference on Requirements Engineering and I was convinced to become steering committee chair [1:09:40] during the period of time to merge these two conferences.

Hellrigel:

Oh, boy.

Mead:

I guess that was a testament to my [1:10:00] ability to bridge two different groups with different viewpoints and try to find commonality.

Hellrigel:

What were their different viewpoints? One is a Requirements Engineering Symposium, and one is an [1:10:20] International Conference.

Mead:

It sounds like they should be similar.

Hellrigel:

Yes.

Mead:

But the symposium was more academic and research-y. The International Conference had more of a practitioner focus. There were various [1:10:40] personalities involved. That we don’t need to get into here.

Hellrigel:

No, no, we don’t.

Mead:

I was seen as somebody who was…

Hellrigel:

Peacemaker.

Mead:

Was sort of a peacemaker. Actually, some people dropped off of the committees for both those conferences during that time period because [1:11:00], well, they thought I was okay, they didn’t agree with the concept of merging.

Hellrigel:

Merging. They merged and what are they now?

Mead:

It’s now the International Requirements [1:11:20] Engineering -- no, International Requirements Engineering Conference, but the acronym for it is RE. There was some compromise. The steering [1:11:40] committees merged. Those who were involved with either conference and wanted to continue stayed on the steering committee. Then ultimately, I think my term expired. I probably stayed on for a while [1:12:00] after that and then that term expired. One of my awards was a Lifetime Service Award. I believe it was the first one that that conference gave. That’s on that wall of plaques behind me. [Laughing] [Upon further reflection, Mead stated, “I was the third recipient of this award.”]

Hellrigel:

Yes, [1:12:20] maybe when we’re processing your oral history we can get a photo of your wall, a photo.

Mead:

It’s actually only a few. I have a lot more. Up there I have the Distinguished Educator [1:12:40] with ACM. I’ve got the IEEE Fellow. The SEI Fellow. Then I have a plaque from the RE Conference, a plaque from the CSEET and it looks like there must be one more back there. [1:13:00] Oh, I know what it is. I have two from RE. One is for being the Steering Committee Chair and the other is the Lifetime Service Award.

Hellrigel:

Oh, wow. That must have been, well, a cultural [1:13:20] merger of sorts: academics and sort of industry.

Mead:

Well, that’s kind of me.

Hellrigel:

Right.

Mead:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

Were there other women involved? Or they’re mostly [1:13:40] men.

Mead:

Oh, sure. Yes, definitely. In all of those efforts. But it wasn’t like it is now where it’s a conscious thing. There were women in all of those fields. [1:14:00] The percentages increased over time but not due to a conscious effort by the societies to make that happen.

Hellrigel:

I 'm going to be the village idiot. What’s Requirement Engineering?

Mead:

Well, [1:14:20] it actually starts with a systems perspective. From a system viewpoint, it’s a set of requirements that the system must satisfy [1:14:40] and typically that manifests itself in hardware, firmware, and software. From a software point of view, it’s the set of requirements that the software application must satisfy [1:15:00].

Hellrigel:

So, you live in both worlds then, the hardware and the software.

Mead:

It was more software for really all my career, even though IBM certainly had a focus on hardware. And obviously in the early days, software [1:15:20] development was so close to hardware that you had to understand the hardware. One of my positions was developing modifications to operating systems. That’s about as close to the hardware as you can get.

Hellrigel:

Yes. [1:15:40] Yes, while you’re doing this, do you have any overlap with IEEE Standards?

Mead:

I actually was involved in the development of a guideline on measurement. That was when I was with IBM. [1:16:00] I have that stored away somewhere because it was all on hard copy then. Then I did a little bit with ISO but not much. They wanted to do something with [1:16:20] cybersecurity but what they had in mind didn’t get traction.

Hellrigel:

Okay. This is I-S-O?

Mead:

Yes, International Standards Organization.

Hellrigel:

Yes, I'm just a little slow [1:16:40] today because that’s the other deal. Some of the people I talk with Standards are also part of that. Wow.

Mead:

But that wasn’t a mainstream thing for me.

Hellrigel:

Right. Right. Yes. I noted a little bit in my notes. You had enough to keep you busy with [1:17:00] education and merging conferences. Then writing two plus textbooks. Teaching. I guess you did some traveling. Do you have any particular conference or lecture you gave that sticks out in your mind? Any traveling [1:17:20] fun or something?

Travel (cont.)

Mead:

I did a lot of travel especially when I was at the SEI.

Hellrigel:

Well, did John Impagliazzo talks about work he’s done [1:17:40] in the Middle East and in China. Were you involved with any of those international projects?

Mead:

In the Middle East I’ve only done remote lectures. I was invited to be a keynote at some conferences over there but [1:18:00] it seemed in that timeframe a little high risk from my viewpoint in terms of safety.

Hellrigel:

Yes, his [John Impagliazzo] focus now is more on China, I think.

Mead:

Yes, John is [1:18:20] more -- I was invited to visit last year and also this year both in the context of IEEE and ACM. They have their own Turing Award [1:18:40] event. There are Turing Award events in a number of locations. One of which is China. We talked about the Special Interest Group in Computer Science Education. [1:19:00] That’s also ACM. I was invited to give talks there. Last year. Then that will also be this year. Then I was invited to be Co-chair of the IEEE Services Symposium [1:19:20] on Education.

Hellrigel:

In this year.

Mead:

This year. Yes. So, this year there will be two sets of invited talks: one for ACM and one for IEEE. But I haven’t been there as [1:19:40] often as John. It’s a little easier for him for two reasons. One is that he likes to travel, and I don’t particularly. In fact, I had pretty much decided I wouldn’t be making those long trips [1:20:00]. I’d been to Japan twice. To Australia three times over the course of my career. To Turkey. I said Western Europe is okay or maybe Hawaii but that’s kind of [1:20:20] as far as I want to go. Here I am going to China.

Hellrigel:

You went to China in 2023 and you'll do it again in 2024?

Mead:

Correct. It’s not easy though because the visa process and this is also an issue that [1:20:40] John doesn’t have, he got a visa When things were a little smooth.

Hellrigel:

A little less – yes [Laughing].

Mead:

Less tense between the two countries. The visa type that I have to get [1:21:00] is one-time only and it’s called Academic Exchange. It was a long process last year. It will be a long process again this year. I might say the same -- [1:21:20] exists for Chinese faculty who want to travel. They also have to go through a long process now whereas perhaps it was easier years ago.

Hellrigel:

Oh. This is good for a fixed number of months or days or years?

Mead:

[1:21:40] You basically have to give them your itinerary. They give you a couple of days before and after for that exact itinerary. John had one that was good for ten years. [1:22:00] So he just [Laughing] -- I won’t say he doesn’t understand the problem, but he doesn’t have the problem that I do.

Hellrigel:

Right, he doesn’t have to deal with it because you have to go through the U.S. State Department and then China.

Mead:

Well, the State Department is less of an issue. But the Chinese [1:22:20] embassy is the thing because you have to have your exact itinerary: flights, hotels, who’s paying for it. Everything.

Hellrigel:

Wow. So, you really have to plan out six [1:22:40] months or more in advance exactly what you need to do.

Mead:

Then I have to coordinate with my counterparts in China who may not know six months in advance.

Hellrigel:

Right, because you need all the documentation, the letters and if they’re putting you up in a hotel or you have to prove you have the money to pay for the hotel.

Mead:

Exactly. [1:23:00] That’s exactly how it is. I will say I have found the faculty that I have met there to be very gracious and cordial. [1:23:20] From an academic viewpoint they are a lot like the faculty here. It’s less of a people thing. Well, the people I interact with, There’s a -- there’s certainly

Hellrigel:

A bureaucratic and diplomatic thing. [1:23:40]

Mead:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

When you go there are the activities in English or do you have a translator?

Mead:

The ACM conference [1:24:00] depending on the speakers and the topic is both Chinese and English. The IEEE conference, [this year’s (2024) Services Symposium was entirely in English]. Now when we talk to faculty otherwise it’s in English but sometimes, they had translators if they didn’t [1:24:20] feel confident. They all speak English at some level, but some are more fluent than others. We had students with us, too, and the students are all [1:24:40] pretty fluent in English. Especially, for both the students and the faculty, those who have lived in an English-speaking country are more fluent than others. Just like it’s the same for us.

Hellrigel:

While you’re reading your paper there might be a simultaneous [1:25:00] translation going on? Like we see at the U.N. with the headsets and all.

Mead:

Well, it’s a smaller group and so let’s say we have twenty to twenty-five faculty, and they’ll have somebody translating, so yes. It’s not simultaneous. [1:25:20] It’s not quite that way. You have to pause while they translate and then continue. Of course, not speaking the language, you have no clue whether it’s being accurately translated. What I have noticed though, [1:25:40] and I’ve had this in other countries as well, generally you can see by the body language that they understand what you’re saying but there’s just that little bit of discomfort and especially if they have questions. [1:26:00] They don’t necessarily want to ask the questions in English.

Hellrigel:

Then what are the social activities? I know some of the conferences you'd go out to dinner afterwards. Is it a bit of a cultural exchange?

Mead:

Oh, they have big conference dinners. [1:26:20] Or if it is a university with a smaller audience, it’s a lunch.

Hellrigel:

Generally, are you there for a week or how does this usually work? It’s a long way to travel for two days.

Mead:

I won’t do that. [1:26:40] The last time I think I was there for seventeen days, but that was because the two conferences were at the beginning and the end of the trip. This time it will be a shorter time which is fine from my perspective. [1:27:00] It’s probably more like, twelve days, maybe ten days there. Of course, it takes a day to get there and back.

Hellrigel:

Right. So, you fly, I guess, to California and then over or from Hawaii?

Mead:

It depends. [1:27:20] Last year I went from here to Chicago, Chicago to Tokyo, Tokyo to Shanghai. Then coming back, I had Shanghai to Dallas, Dallas back here. This year it looks different. [1:27:40] I need to take another look to see about the flights. They have quite a few that go. You can appreciate this. They have quite a few that go from New York, but I would just as soon not fly through New York City,

Hellrigel:

The JFK Airport (John F. Kennedy Airport). [1:28:00]

Mead:

[Laughing] Right.

Hellrigel:

Do you have to make your own arrangements?

Mead:

No, they make the arrangements for me.

Hellrigel:

They cover the air fare and all of that.

Mead:

Right.

Hellrigel:

You just show up with your visa in hand and your passport.

Mead:

[1:28:20] Now if I do sightseeing on my own, that’s a whole different story. But as far as the official part of the trip, yes, that’s paid for because after all I am now retired, so there is nobody else to fund me. [Laughing] [1:28:40]

Hellrigel:

Right. Right, but I didn’t know if you had to do all your arrangements and then go through the process. Like at IEEE, we’ve got the CONCUR process.

Mead:

I’ve used that. I think the reason, and I don’t know for sure the reasons, [1:29:00] I'm guessing, because it’s an easier transaction for them.

Hellrigel:

Right, then to transfer money to you to compensate.

Mead:

Right. Then, not surprisingly, they shop around for airfare and airline combinations that we wouldn’t necessarily think of. [1:29:20]

Hellrigel:

Then a side question. Do you get to keep your miles? [Laughing]

Mead:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

[Laughing] Because those are a lot of miles. [Laughing].

Mead:

Hotel credits, too. [Laughing]. If it’s a hotel that I would stay at.

Hellrigel:

Well, do you stay at a Hilton, a Marriott, what do they have in China? [1:29:40]

Mead:

Last year they had their own hotels. The one that was different was a Hilton Garden Inn. [1:30:00] This year, the one conference will be a J. W. Marriott. I think the other one is a local hotel combined with a conference center. [1:30:20] They do a lot of hotel/conference center combinations. You know it’s easier if everybody is in one place.

Hellrigel:

Right. Then they have to get you in on a taxi or something.

Mead:

Local transportation is not [1:30:40] easy because invariably they’re in a big city. I mean from our viewpoint, really big.

Hellrigel:

So, Shanghai or?

Mead:

Well, Shanghai I think has an extended population of 40 million people. Maybe 20 million in the city itself. [1:31:00] When they talk about a smaller city, it’s the size of New York City.

Hellrigel:

Okay. Wow. So, you’ve been doing this for a few years then, China.

Mead:

Well, this is the second year. I don’t, you know [1:31:20] it’s not, um…

Hellrigel:

It’s an adventure.

Mead:

Yes. I don’t see it as a long-term thing because at some point I'm going to really say to myself I don’t want to do this travel anymore. [Laughing]

Hellrigel:

Well, yes, it’s hard on you and [1:31:40] the travel and the stress and you have to ask you’re the question to yourself: what for?

Mead:

Exactly. I enjoy just staying professionally active, but [Laughing] this is really stretching it a little bit. [1:32:00].

Hellrigel:

Oh, you said you went to Australia a few times?

Mead:

Yes. Once was on vacation. Once was when I was managing the Education Group at IBM. We had a big project over there. [1:32:20] We were training the local folks that we were working with. Then the third time I was a keynote at a conference there. It was twice to Sydney and once to Melbourne. [1:32:40] Actually, I think I got invited… I worked with John [Impagliazzo] on Computing Curricula 2020. I was the lead for the software engineering piece of it. I think I was invited to a meeting over there [1:33:00] but it was…

Hellrigel:

The COVID year?

Mead:

No, it was before that, but it was a short duration meeting. It didn’t make any sense to me to make that trip. Especially since I had already been there [1:33:20] a few times. But everybody’s different. Some people love to travel and they’re glad to stay for a few extra days and do something on their own.

Hellrigel:

Did you have any trips to South America?

Mead:

Yes. When I was [1:33:40] working on the Editorial Board for IEEE Software, we had a meeting in Buenos Aires. Then the RE conference was held in Rio one year, in Brazil. [1:34:00]

Hellrigel:

Wow.

Mead:

[1:34:00] Then, this isn’t really South America.

Hellrigel:

Or central America?

Mead:

I was invited to a conference in Mexico to talk about cybersecurity curricula. [1:34:20] Also in Spain. I’ve been to Western Europe so many times that I’ve can’t kept track of all of that travel. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been to the various countries over there.

Hellrigel:

For work and vacation [1:34:40] I guess?

Mead:

Yes. Yes. A lot of them at some point became combined trips. Then the two trips to Japan, one was the RE conference and the other was I was invited to [1:35:00] visit one of their institutions, NII National Institute of Informatics to talk about cyber security requirements engineering.

Hellrigel:

How were those trips to Japan? [1:35:20]

Mead:

Those were also long trips. It was a little easier in that they have nonstops that go from Chicago and also from San Francisco. The one from Chicago, I did a few times [1:35:40]. That was ANA, All Nippon Airways, and that was very nice. They are always, as much as they can be, exactly on time.

Hellrigel:

Okay. They’re punctual. Did you travel much in [1:36:00] the Eastern Bloc or Russia?

Mead:

Only one time was back in the old Soviet days and that was part of a vacation trip. That part of the trip we were escorted everywhere, which of course was a good thing. [1:36:20]

Hellrigel:

Yes, so you know where you’re going and language barriers and all.

Mead:

Yes. Yes. In that timeframe, the average Russian did not speak English.

Career reflections, awards

Hellrigel:

This is a lot of traveling. I guess you are only semi-retired because [1:36:40] a few weeks ago we rescheduled, you were writing a paper. What were you writing a paper about and for which conference?

Mead:

Oh, it took me a minute to remember. I was doing some work on cybersecurity for Open Source Software. We did two things. [1:37:00] One was a white paper that’s on the SEI website. That was with the folks at the SEI. The other was a short paper that I’ve submitted to this year’s Conference on Software Engineering Education and Training. I don’t know if it will be [1:37:20] accepted yet. I'm actually chairing a workshop there this year. I'm still pretty heavily involved in that conference. I don’t know if I mentioned it. They give an award in my name.

Hellrigel:

Yes. How did that come about? [1:37:40]

Mead:

Well, they had discussions about giving a named award for software engineering education. I think after I was no longer the Steering Committee Chair, the Steering Committee decided [1:38:00] to attach my name to it.

Hellrigel:

Yes, because that’s in my notes, too. The award, how did that feel when they put your name on it?

Mead:

Well, it was kind of ironic because [1:38:20] the first recipient was Mary Shaw, who has a much bigger reputation than I do. [Laughing]. I know Mary well and I said, I would have felt honored if it was the other way around. [Laughing]

Hellrigel:

[Laughing].

Mead:

But, yes, she was very gracious and [1:38:40] that was in Pittsburgh. I was there when she received the award.

Hellrigel:

They named it for you. It’s not something that you endowed.

Mead:

No. There's no funding. It’s a plaque or maybe [1:39:00] some small gift. No, there’s no funding. Unfortunately, education doesn’t get a lot of endowments.

Hellrigel:

No. No. But it must feel good that that at the end of all that work you’ve done, to have this [1:39:20] named in your honor.

Mead:

It certainly was.

Hellrigel:

To be recognized.

Mead:

It was big in terms of recognition because when you do those things, sometimes it’s appreciated and other times not so much.

Hellrigel:

Yes, so going [1:39:20] to those un- air conditioned academic buildings.

Mead:

[Laughing].

Hellrigel:

And it was summer, you were recognized for the sacrifice that you made. You’re a fellow of a number of organizations. You have an award named after you. You have textbooks [1:40:00] that are still in publication.

Mead:

I think they’re out of print, but of course the e-versions are still available.

Hellrigel:

Are you content with your career?

Mead:

Yes. I think there were things I could have done [1:40:20] differently.

Hellrigel:

Like what?

Mead:

Well, I'm very persistent. I think I stayed in some positions longer than I should have if I was being smart about it.

Hellrigel:

So, you could have moved?

Mead:

[1:40:40] Transitioned into something where I either had a better career path or was more rewarding. But on the whole, I'm satisfied. If I weren’t such a blockhead, I probably wouldn’t have accomplished what I did.

Hellrigel:

[1:41:00] Maybe jumping jobs for financial rewards…

Mead:

Yes, the only job that I really left quickly was the first one at Chase Manhattan because it became clear to me that software was not their main business.

Hellrigel:

Right, and that was what, [1:41:20] eighteen months? I forget.

Mead:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

We talked about that.

Mead:

Probably less than that.

Hellrigel:

Okay.

Mead:

If you were lucky, you might get to where you were managing a group of ten or fifteen people, but you didn’t really have a career path. At IBM of course, [1:41:40] software was a big part of the business. What really was good for me was that the senior technical staff position was a technical leadership role.

Hellrigel:

Okay, you got new skillsets. [1:42:00]

Mead:

You could be in a technical role, or a management role and I enjoyed both of those over the course of my career. Similarly, at the SEI, I wasn’t always in a management role. I went back and forth.

Hellrigel:

One thing you could have done different was [1:42:20] leave some positions a little quicker. What else?

Mead:

If I had an idea of…

Hellrigel:

A career path?

Mead:

A career strategy.

Hellrigel:

Yes.

Mead:

A long-term strategy, yes. The other thing I would say, [1:42:40] and we talked about this earlier, because I didn’t come from a well-to-do family, I wasn’t really a risk-taker. People who I knew who started their own business, well, I never considered that because the idea of not having a salary [1:43:00] was pretty scary.

Hellrigel:

Okay. The whole entrepreneurial startup.

Mead:

Lots of times people would say, oh, you know you could be a female-owned business, you could get all of these contracts, et cetera. I just never [1:43:20] seriously considered it.

Hellrigel:

Yes, I can understand it. It was not going to bring you peace of mind. Any other second thoughts or…?

Mead:

Well, last time we talked about a few things [1:43:40] that I investigated.

Hellrigel:

Right.

Mead:

Going back very early. I have one box of memorabilia. I travel very light. I did locate my [1:44:00] National Honor Society pin.

Hellrigel:

Cool.

Mead:

We talked about my dad being involved in photoengraving.

Hellrigel:

Right.

Mead:

One of the things that he made during a spare moment at work, [1:44:20] which I have here now, was an ink stamp for the NYU seal.

Hellrigel:

Oh. That’s cool.

Mead:

You probably can’t see the details.

Hellrigel:

No, I could see it. We can have you take photos of them.

Mead:

Okay.

Hellrigel:

[1:44:40] He was working for NYU or was this because you went to NYU?

Mead:

It was because I went there. Nobody in my family was a college graduate so it was a big deal.

Hellrigel:

Oh, I didn’t know if he had some kind of little business on the side.

Mead:

No, no.

Hellrigel:

Oh.

Mead:

That wasn’t it. [1:45:00] In fact, he was in a union.

Hellrigel:

Okay. So, he was awful proud of you and he made you the stamp.

Mead:

It has the seal.

Hellrigel:

Okay, the exact seal. He didn’t modify it for you?

Mead:

No.

Hellrigel:

But you could stamp it on [1:45:20] your correspondence.

Mead:

I could stamp it on my correspondence.

Hellrigel:

Your Christmas cards or holiday messages.

Mead:

Right. From the looks of it I would say that I did use it, but probably only in that timeframe. Then I found the Rensselaer Award, too. [1:45:40]

Hellrigel:

Oh. That’s cool.

Mead:

I have all of those little artifacts.

Hellrigel:

We can take photos of them, and we can inset them with your transcript.

Mead:

Okay. I didn’t know what I still had because [1:46:00] I’ve lived in ten different places so between the number of moves that I’ve made and then at one point we had our stuff in storage and the storage place got flooded.

Hellrigel:

Oh, wow.

Mead:

I lost a bunch of things, especially a lot of [1:46:20] photos. But somehow these things survived.

Hellrigel:

Maybe they were above the flood water line. It’s the luck of the piling.

Mead:

Well, that was one of the interesting things that the moving company discovered. [1:46:40] Because the movers were lazy, they would put the heavier pieces of furniture on the lower level and the lighter weight things up above.

Hellrigel:

Yes. Wow. Yes. Well, I hope I didn’t put you out [1:47:00] too much, looking for the material.

Mead:

No, like I say, all I have is one small box that’s still remaining, so it was pretty easy.

Hellrigel:

Okay. I guess I don’t know if there are any questions I didn't ask? Any topic you would like to cover?

Mead:

[1:47:20] Let me think about this. Yes, actually there is.

Hellrigel:

Okay. Go ahead.

Mead:

One of the things that I really enjoyed pretty much later in my career [1:47:40] is mentoring younger faculty or younger researchers. Once in a while somebody actually asks me to do that and sometimes they just recognize that that’s what’s happened [1:48:00]. And especially now they’re the ones that are trying to build a career and they’re the ones that I'm trying to help. I'm not looking forward to building my own career at this point. It is [1:48:20] what it is.

Hellrigel:

Did you do this when you were at SEI?

Mead:

Yes, and right now.

Hellrigel:

Okay. Did you do it through IEEE Women in Engineering?

Mead:

No, it was just informal. [1:48:40]

Hellrigel:

Okay.

Mead:

The university had a mentoring program and I participated in that a couple of times, but they didn’t do a very good job of matching, at least in that time of matching [1:49:00] the mentors and the mentees.

Hellrigel:

This is Carnegie Mellon?

Mead:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

Now, how do you find these people? Through a conference or a friend says can you chat?

Mead:

Well, sometimes colleagues will contact me, and they’ll say, I have this student [1:49:20] who’s trying to get a degree. Do you have any advice for them?

Hellrigel:

I know IEEE also has that group, the Young Professionals. I was just at the Life Member Conference and there was a lot of talk about mentoring.

Mead:

Yes, but I haven’t [1:49:40] found that. It hasn’t really been a formal process. Some people, the younger people who I worked with, actually asked me to be mentors.

Hellrigel:

Oh.

Mead:

Once again, informally. Some of them they’ll ask me to review [1:50:00] proposals and that kind of thing, or to review papers that they’re working on.

Hellrigel:

Have any of them asked you to sponsor them for membership of an organization?

Mead:

I don’t think so. [1:50:20] Here and there I’ve nominated people for… I nominated one colleague to be on this Distinguished Visitor list. One of them was accepted and the other one not. It’s kind of [1:50:40] a haphazard thing.

Hellrigel:

This was the IEEE Computer Society.

Mead:

Yes. Actually, more recently as the Treasurer of the Savannah Section of IEEE I'm [1:51:00] making connections between some of the universities in this section and some of the schools in the area that are trying to encourage young people into STEM careers [1:51:00].

Hellrigel:

Oh, that’s right. Is this through Tri-Engineering or just more contacting student branches of?

Mead:

Well, sometimes they have local events.

Hellrigel:

Okay.

Mead:

I know some of the people in the local [1:51:40] high schools and on the school board. They have their own volunteer group, so I’ve made connections between them and local universities.

Hellrigel:

How did you become elected or volunteer to be treasurer [1:52:00]?

Mead:

[Laughing]. Well, [Laughing], it shows what a pushover I am. During the shutdown, the Section had become dormant. The Region, which is Region 3 of IEEE put out a call for volunteers to be officers, [1:52:20] so I volunteered. We now have a small group of officers but it’s like pulling teeth to get people to be active because it’s a small [1:52:40] section. We haven’t had a lot of industry participation.

Hellrigel:

Do you meet? Yes, I think you have to have like X number of activities a year or else you go dormant. You could probably do a Zoom meeting.

Mead:

Oh, we’ve done a lot of activities. [1:53:00] But it’s kind of stretching the definition. There are a couple of big activities and we’ve done some smaller ones, too.

Hellrigel:

What are your big activities?

Mead:

Oh, there’s a Girls’ Engineer It [1:53:20] Day in Savannah. The target audience is girls in intermediate school although it’s open to anybody. That had seven volunteers and [1:53:40] seventy-five participants for our piece of it. Then there’s the Savannah Engineering Academy that takes place in the summer. We additionally did a visit from this local school board and guidance counselors [1:54:00] to Georgia Southern University. We had a tour of their computing and engineering buildings and labs and met with the Dean there. One of the interesting things down here is that [1:54:20] many of the states have agreements or I should say many universities in contiguous states have agreements for out of state students to get in-state tuition.

Hellrigel:

Oh, so a regional thing.

Mead:

[1:54:40] Yes. South Carolina students can get in-state tuition at certain universities in Georgia. Same for Florida and Alabama. Maybe North Carolina.

Hellrigel:

Well, that expands their opportunity.

Mead:

Absolutely. [1:55:00]

Hellrigel:

Because mostly if you go out of state, I know out of state California is three times the tuition and Rutgers is two times the tuition.

Mead:

Yes, and in the northeast it’s a little bit different. I don’t know how common that is. I had never heard of it before. [1:55:20].

Hellrigel:

Wow. Do you like working with the students then, the younger ones?

Mead:

Yes. In fact, that’s something that I’ve always enjoyed but I enjoyed [1:55:40] working with them in small groups rather than giving formal lectures.

Hellrigel:

How big?

Mead:

That’s just me.

Hellrigel:

What are they working on? Do you have a project, or they just want to talk about your career [1:56:00]?

Mead:

It could be anything. Any of those.

Hellrigel:

Is there any continuity? Do you have any of the students come around for a few years?

Mead:

Not so much to me. [1:56:20] There are some local mentoring groups that stay in touch with their students over a longer time period. But I'm not involved with those. I have enough volunteer work to do as it is [Laughing].

Hellrigel:

Right, right. I mean the girls [1:56:40], I don’t know how to put it, but the girls must be impressed that for all they hear about girls in STEM, girls in STEM, but then they meet someone that’s made such a long career in STEM, must show them they could do it. Some influence on them [1:57:00] because they always hear about so few people, and they get to meet one.

Mead:

Right. I suppose. It’s not clear to me at the time but I'm guessing that’s -- I know that was the case when I was younger

Hellrigel:

Yes. That you see someone that can do it. [1:57:20] Yes. When you were in other places were you involved in the local Section? Now you’re with the IEEE Savannah Section.

Mead:

Well, in Pittsburgh I attended some meetings, but I wasn’t really involved [1:57:40] in the section.

Hellrigel:

Maybe now that your career slowed down a little bit you have more time?

Mead:

[Laughing].

Hellrigel:

I don’t know.

Mead:

I wish.

Hellrigel:

You wish? So, what’s the future?

Mead:

Well, the thing of it is, here’s my perception. [1:58:00] A lot of the work that’s done at the Section level is administrative. I don’t really enjoy that that much. It just seems like there’s a lot of administrative overhead loaded onto these positions [1:58:20].

Hellrigel:

Financial this, you have to file a report on that, you have to…

Mead:

Well, you have to use a set of tools. It’s not so easy.

Hellrigel:

Yes, V tools.

Mead:

You have to do required training. In the old days when you volunteered to do something, [1:58:40] people were glad to have somebody who would do the work.

Hellrigel:

Oh, so you have to go through formal training on this is the V tools, this is CONCUR.

Mead:

Well, it’s more. It’s more on there’s training on conflict of interest. [1:59:00]

Hellrigel:

Okay. How to behave kind of training.

Mead:

Right. Right. Right. Which for me at this point seems silly.

Hellrigel:

Yes, you would hope that people would know how to behave at this point, but I guess [1:59:20] the Legal and Compliance Department tells us otherwise.

Mead:

Yes, I get that, but it certainly makes you think twice about volunteering when you say, oh, by the way, we’re not just asking you to be treasurer, but you’ve got to do A, B, and C as well.

Hellrigel:

Yes. We have [1:59:40] to do that. Yes, even if we don’t do certain things, we still have to take training in it. When you were in employment but as a volunteer, you probably thought you’d be beyond that [Laughing].

Mead:

Exactly.

Career advice, closing remarks

Hellrigel:

Any other topics? [2:00:00] I just looked through my notes. I think I'm at the end of my list. I don’t know if you have any advice for those coming up but in a STEM field?

Mead:

My advice is always the same. Do the work [2:00:20] that you love and that you’re enthusiastic about. It’s great to have career goals but having goals for awards is not realistic. [2:00:40]

Hellrigel:

Right.

Mead:

If you do things that will cause you to get an award, then it will happen but you don’t have a goal that say I want to receive this award.

Hellrigel:

Yes, you have no control over the process.

Mead:

Right.

Hellrigel:

You should [2:01:00] do something enjoyable and not chase fame.

Mead:

Concentrate on doing the work that’s meaningful and you’ll get the recognition.

Hellrigel:

Okay. Is there anything that’s developed in your career that’s sort of blown your mind beyond what you ever expected? [2:01:20] Like when you were growing up did you see yourself going to China to give a speech or something like that?

Mead:

Oh, no. I thought it was a big deal the first time I went to Europe. That was on a vacation trip. [2:01:40]

Hellrigel:

Yes. Now you’ve lived and moved ten times. That’s quite a lot of movement and change.

Mead:

Well, that was also something. My family was moving from New York to New Jersey. [2:02:00].

Hellrigel:

Exactly. Exactly. You’re in a whole different socioeconomic sphere. I guess the last question I would ask, are there any [2:02:20] challenges that you faced because of your socioeconomic roots? I mean you had to work during school and such. But I don’t know if you’ve found any [2:02:40] biases or anything like that.

Mead:

No, I wouldn’t say that. It didn’t seem like it at the time, but I would say on the whole there was a benefit [2:03:00] to coming from a family that was not well-to-do because I could talk to anybody.

Hellrigel:

True. You have your personal skills, you could adapt.

Mead:

Although at the time I was [2:03:20] wishing I had been able to go to private school and not public school because I would have been more accepted there as a kid.

Hellrigel:

Right.

Mead:

But in the long term I did get some benefit from being associated with [2:03:40] different economic groups over the course of my lifetime.

Hellrigel:

Any advice for IEEE? There's much talk about women not going into STEM fields, women and their membership numbers in IEEE. Any advice for [2:04:00] IEEE in general? If, going forward, if you would have a suggestion or two? I know it’s a weird question but…

Mead:

It’s hard to know what the cause and effect relationship is. A lot of people [2:04:20] speculate on that.

Hellrigel:

Exactly.

Mead:

I don’t have really have big words of wisdom. I know what I do professionally with other people, but I don’t know if it scales [2:04:40] up.

Hellrigel:

Right. Often people ask me that question. Historically, why aren’t there women doing this or why are men less frequently in that field and I said you’d probably have to ask the people who left.

Mead:

Well, people never really got into it in the first [2:05:00] place. I think it’s really hard for me to say at this point because I'm so far removed. I know that [2:05:20] when I was a kid, being one of the smarter one in the class was not an asset [Laughing].

Hellrigel:

Oh, you were picked on a little bit or you stuck out too much.

Mead:

Oh, well, the [2:05:40] other kids might ask me about how to do homework assignments. Socially I was kind of an outcast except for a small group of friends.

Hellrigel:

What are your goals going forward? What are you..? [2:06:00] I know dance lessons, golf. Some travel.

Mead:

Right. I don’t know. I don’t remember if we talked about it. I did a double major in college. Math and French and I'm [2:06:20] trying to improve my French. I belong to a couple of French social groups.

Hellrigel:

Do you get together for dinner and speak in French?

Mead:

Yep, some of them are French only and others are a mix: French and English. [2:06:40]. Then I have a French teacher, she’s retired, that I work with to reconstitute my French grammar which of course never having spent a lot of time there lost a lot of that. Trying to put that back together [2:07:00].

Hellrigel:

Then then you hope to travel to France or read French novels or?

Mead:

Well, I do read fluently. That’s easy. Actually, I was there a couple of years ago on vacation and my conversation improved [2:07:20] during the time that I was there. In part because I spoke French better than any of the friends who were traveling with me. [Laughing]

Hellrigel:

So, you were the translator.

Mead:

Definitely. It got to be quite a challenge in some environments. We were in some museums where I was trying [2:07:40] to translate the descriptions of various objects and the descriptions of artistic objects aren’t necessarily common phrases.

Hellrigel:

Exactly, yes, that’s a problem. [Laughing]

Mead:

There were no [2:08:00] English translations. Even reading a menu was trivial but if they’re talking about what the specials are in a restaurant I might or might not get it the first time around. [2:08:20].

Hellrigel:

Right. Yes, I like it when I go places and they have it on a chalkboard so at least I could use a dictionary.

Mead:

Well, the interesting place was Japan because almost everywhere they would have the names of the restaurants in Japanese and English. But in the restaurants [2:08:40] that were mostly for the Japanese, the menu would only be in Japanese.

Hellrigel:

Yes. That’s beyond a challenge for English speakers.

Mead:

Yes, some places would have plastic prototypes of the food in the window so you could point out what you wanted. [2:09:00].

Hellrigel:

Wow. Any other travel trips coming up?

Mead:

Huh, well, no vacation trips. I'm going up to Pittsburgh in June to teach for a few days. Then in July I’ve got the trip to China [2:09:20] followed shortly thereafter by a trip to Germany.

Hellrigel:

For another conference?

Mead:

Well, that’s the CSEE&T. That’s it for this year.

Hellrigel:

Okay. Well, that’s enough.

Mead:

[Laughing] It’s more than enough but I don’t get to be able to [2:09:40]…

Hellrigel:

Right. Have you started to plan your 2025? Has John Impagliazzo pinned you down yet?

Mead:

No, the only thing I have planned in 2025 is a real vacation trip to South Africa.

Hellrigel:

Oh. For a month or what’s your game plan?

Mead:

[2:10:00] No, it’s about, I don't know. What is it, eleven days.

Hellrigel:

With a tour group?

Mead:

Yes. It’s a small group tour with twelve or fourteen people. It should be really nice.

Hellrigel:

[2:10:20] I guess this will be the safari experience, too?

Mead:

Well, they call it a safari but it’s not so much. They have a building of fourteen air-conditioned suites. Each have [2:10:40] their own small swimming pool and bar.

Hellrigel:

Oh, so you’re in the outback, but you’re not roughing it.

Mead:

During the time when you’re not out looking at the wildlife, you can get a spa treatment.

Hellrigel:

Oh. Well, I guess that [2:11:00] has to appeal to the small group.

Mead:

Right.

Hellrigel:

They take you on safari.

Mead:

It’s fine with me. I’ve never been into camping and people will talk about being in Africa and going on a safari where if you had to go to the restroom [2:11:20] at night it would be in another building and you had to be careful about the wildlife and have somebody escort you, et cetera. It’s nothing like that.

Hellrigel:

Well, you’ve earned a luxurious vacation.

Mead:

[Laughing].

Hellrigel:

A different experience.

Mead:

It will be a once in a lifetime thing for sure. [2:11:40]

Hellrigel:

Well, that sounds like fun. Then you have golf.

Mead:

Well, golf, it’s not as much of a priority for me anymore. But it’s certainly available to me any time.

Hellrigel:

Then you take your dance classes. [2:12:00]

Mead:

Yes, and I'm going to the gym almost every day, doing some kind of fitness class.

Hellrigel:

You’re keeping active. The weather in South Carolina…

Mead:

Well, right now, it’s nice and sunny but it’s starting to get warm and humid.

Hellrigel:

Oh, so then [2:12:20] it’s that soupy, humid summer around the corner.

Mead:

Yes. April, it starts to get warm, by May it’s kind of like the summer in the northeast.

Hellrigel:

It sounds like you have [2:12:40] a balance then between being the Treasurer of the Savannah Section, mentoring a bit, and then planning vacations and having a dance class.

Mead:

Giving talks. [Laughing] Giving talks and lectures.

Hellrigel:

Yes. That will be your game plan for the next few years?

Mead:

[2:13:00] I don’t know. I guess I'm still not very good at planning. These things just come up.

Hellrigel:

Right. Well, you’re Savannah, your term as treasurer lasts another year or two?

Mead:

I don’t remember.

Hellrigel:

Okay. Then you can --

Mead:

It’s been a real challenge because I hadn’t [2:13:20] anticipated with these smaller sections how difficult it would be to get people involved.

Hellrigel:

Right. The fewer people, the more that those involved have to do.

Mead:

As it is, since all the other officers are faculty [2:13:40], they’re working full time.

Hellrigel:

This is the Savannah, Georgia Chapter.

Mead:

Correct.

Hellrigel:

Okay, so that’s a bit of a travel for you.

Mead:

Well, it may be twenty-five miles. It’s not far. It’s close to me.

Hellrigel:

[2:14:00] I didn’t know you were by the border.

Mead:

Yes. It’s close to the South Carolina and Georgia border. Almost as far south in South Carolina as you can get.

Hellrigel:

[IEEE] Region 3, you’re not being reorganized. Region 1 and 2 are being reorganized [2:14:20] going forward. You don’t have to worry about that admin job.

Mead:

It wouldn’t be a bad idea if they combined some of these sections. The problem is they’re too large geographically.

Hellrigel:

Right, the driving. But that might be the future. If some are inactive, [2:14:40] I'm not sure. That’s an MGA question [Laughing].

Mead:

[Laughing]. I don’t intend to reach those organizational levels.

Hellrigel:

Okay. Yes. I was talking to someone at the Life Member [2:15:00] Conference and he’s trying to reactivate or get something off probation: chapters of one of the technical societies and that. I think we’ve covered just about everything.

Mead:

I think so, too. [2:15:20].

Hellrigel:

I really welcome your generosity of your time. When I get it, I have to do some processing and it might be a few months to get it out to you.

Mead:

That’s okay with me [Laughing].

Hellrigel:

Okay.

Mead:

Given my near [2:15:40] term schedule and I really appreciate the opportunity to do this.

Hellrigel:

If we have to add anything on, we can figure out a way, an addendum or a little firsthand history if I’ve missed anything and in the meantime I’d just say travel safely and good luck with the section. [2:16:00].

Mead:

Sure. Oh, thank you. Well, if we didn’t have challenges then life would be boring.

Hellrigel:

You’d be bored. I didn’t hear your puppy once in these two sessions.

Mead:

Oh, let’s see.

Hellrigel:

Okay. What’s the puppy’s name? [2:16:20]

Mead:

It’s Cocoa.

Hellrigel:

Cocoa. Well, we didn't get introduced.

Mead:

Yes, he’s getting a nice afternoon nap.

Hellrigel:

Well, good, because soon it’s going to be very hot for him to do his strolls.

Mead:

Well, he won’t do a stroll. He doesn’t have much choice [2:16:40] on that. It’s not a long stroll these days.

Hellrigel:

Well, thank you.

Mead:

I call him an old man dog. He’s somewhere between fourteen and fifteen.

Hellrigel:

Okay, he’s a senior lad. Oh, so thank you.

Mead:

Senior dog for a senior citizen.

Hellrigel:

Works for me. [2:17:00] Well, thank you very much Dr. Mead. Enjoy the summer.

Mead:

Well, thank you.

Hellrigel:

Thank you. Bye, bye.

Mead:

Take care. Bye.