Natasha D'Souza

National Engineering Week is round the corner and as promised here is the first post in the “Women in Engineering” series.

Karen Chow is an Electrical Engineer who currently works as a Technical Marketing Engineer for Mentor Graphics in Portland, Oregon. I asked her if she always wanted to be an engineer or was it something that she discovered along the way.

We started our discussion with what she liked in high school.

“Back in high school I liked math, chemistry, physics as well as music. I excelled in these subjects. When it came time to deciding what to do after high school it was hard to know what I wanted. I liked math, chemistry and physics and did well in them. My councilors suggested that I go into engineering.”

She did not have anyone in her immediate family who was an engineer and heard about engineering through her councilors. She was good in music as well as the sciences. We talked about what programs she applied for in university.

“I applied to different programs, music, science and engineering, to keep my options open.”

She was accepted into these programs however chose to have a career that was somewhat practical.

“I made my decision by looking at it from a practical point of view. Music would always be a part of my life but it’s hard to make a good living. There are very few jobs in chemistry that make a good living. So I accepted engineering”

“The first two years of engineering, at the University of Calgary, are common engineering courses. I gravitated towards electrical engineering courses”

We talked about co-op jobs and internships. There was an internship program in the third year however she did not make it into the program and found a summer job instead. This job was for a programmer in relational databases which later proved to be valuable job experience.

“After graduating I was offered a job at Nortel, in Ottawa, in the Provisioning group, which is about entering information into the switch. There were 200 people working on this project and I had a narrow, specific task to do. There were code reviews and well defined processes to follow.”

Being a large company, Nortel had very well defined processes and code reviews. It was a great first job as there were a lot of people to lean on and learn from. She worked in this group for two years but found that she was not using a lot of what she learnt in her undergraduate program. She had taken only four programming courses but more hardware related courses. Wanting something more related to engineering, she took some master courses. This opened the door to an analog IC design job which dealt with Bode Plots, analog design and half the courses in undergrad applied to this job.

“This job was very different as there were a few people working on this project. I was one of three designers and there were only 6 people on this project. This meant that I had a lot more responsibility however there was a lot of coaching from the team lead and managers.”

Karen spent two years doing Analog IC design and then left Nortel to work for Mentor Graphics as an Applications Engineer. Her analog design experience combined with her excellent communication skills made her the ideal candidate for this job. In this department five out of six engineers were women leading her to believe that women preferred to have jobs that needed a combination of engineering and good communication skills.

“This job was somewhat generic as the amount of the commission, for all of Canada, was determined. I had to support ten tools and basically make things happen. My manager was in Toronto therefore only one on Canada supporting this particular tool. I made a lot of cold calls, seminars and workshops. I worked with account managers, talked with people in the office and tried different things.”

This job was not structured and she had to figure out what worked and how she could be effective. Although it was an applications engineer position it was somewhat sales oriented with a high emphasis on relationship building and problem solving. The only guidelines that Karen had were the quota and how to do the best with her personality and skills to find the best solution.

After a few years in this position Karen moved to Portland to join the Marketing team as a Technical Marketing Engineer .

“This role is one more step away from engineering. It combines the understanding of IC design and parasitic extraction. I work with engineering, application engineering and give customer feedback to engineering. I give training, workshops, seminars and write articles for magazines.”

Karen has written various technical papers and articles which can be found at EE Asia, Mentor and RF Design. Her role within the team is defined by each person’s strengths and skills.

We talked about what she does asides from work. Karen has continued her interest and passion for music and currently plays bass in a 80s cover band. She is participates in various sports. She likes karaoke and her latest hobby is quilting.

Karen finds engineering very interesting with new technologies. It encompasses a wide range and can be technical or people focused. So lots of opportunities and fun jobs.