With the significant increase in graduate students characterized as nontraditional, challenges associated with balance have become more prominent. The author explores issues of work‐life balance, institutional ownership, and the chilly climate, each of which can contribute to negative academic outcomes.
Background and Significance A longstanding and robust performance gap on tests of visual-spatial ability has been well documented in the cognitive psychology literature, with women, in general, having less welldeveloped skills, especially on tasks of mental rotation. 1,2,3 Visual-spatial ability, also called spatial visualization, is defined by McGee as the ability to mentally rotate, twist, or invert pictorially presented visual stimuli. 4 The ability to discern relationships between shapes and objects has also been found to be an important factor for, if not predictive of, success in disciplines that involve the manipulation of objects in spatial environments such as engineering, chemistry, and computer science. 5,6,7 According to Cooper and Mumaw, 8 the spatial aptitude literature is quite clear in showing that a broadly defined spatial factor exists independently of verbal and quantitative factors and that this spatial factor is more effective than other measures of intelligence in predicting success in certain academic and industrial areas.
Beth left civil engineering as an undergraduate at UC Santa Cruz, and graduated with honors in mathematics and in psychology. She obtained her MS and PhD at Cornell in Environmental and Water Resources Systems Engineering. She completed a postdoc at the Center for Advanced Decision Support in Water and Environmental Systems (CADSWES) at UC Boulder. Beth's career goals include increasing the diversity of engineering students and improving education for all engineering students. Some of Beth's current projects are: an NSF planning project for the Collaborative Large-scale Engineering Analysis Network for Environmental Research, an AAUW project assessing the effectiveness of Expanding Your Horizon's Conferences and a water resources curriculum project using CADSWES software. She is the Frontiers in Education 2006 Program Co-Chair.
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