My colleague Tona Henderson and I are beginning the search for a graduate assistant for the 2004-2005 academic year. Because our research is on underrepresentation of women in IT, we’d prefer that it be a woman.
The assistantship includes tuition reimbursement for two courses per quarter (with a possibility of three courses; we’re negotiating for that right now), a $16,000 stipend over the 9-month academic year, and a nice office. You also get to work with great people on interesting work.
The MSIT program at RIT offers a wide variety of specializations—including web and multimedia development, XML, game programming, networking, e-commerce, and software development and management. The entrance requirements are quite manageable even for someone without a highly technical undergraduate degree. (And yes, I know the web site is awful. There’s a new one under development, but I didn’t want to wait for it to post this announcement.)
If you’re interested, or know someone who might be, please contact me directly.
There hasn’t been a lot of posting lately on misbehaving.net. I suspect that the unrelenting negative tone of the comments have a lot to do with that. It’s discouraging for those of us writing there. And what’s most discouraging is that the most negative and meanspirited comments on the site seem to come consistently from other women.
Take, for example, danah’s recent post on defining and categorizing weblogs. We posted about it in three places—danah’s and my personal sites, and misbehaving.net. We got comments in all three places, as well on other sites. Many of the people who commented felt that the underlying idea was problematic. But contrast the tone of Clay’s comments on Many-to-Many, or jeremy’s here with Jeneane’s on misbehaving.net.
The comments on misbehaving led danah to write about her sense that blogs aren’t a safe space. And they’ve led me to seriously consider shutting comments down on misbehaving.net. Trackbacks would allow people to comment remotely from their own bully pulpits. The point of the site was to celebrate and highlight women in technology, not create a online catfight club. The original purpose is becoming obscured by negativity, and at the moment it just doesn’t seem worth it.
This is not about unwillingness to hear criticism. I have no problem with disagreement. It’s about unwillingness to tolerate meanspirited personal attacks. And if people can’t tell the difference between the two…well, I think that says a lot about them.
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