As a Black woman pursuing her undergraduate degree and now PhD in electrical engineering, Carmen Haseltine has seen and experienced plenty of the forces that dissuade aspiring scientists and engineers from traditionally underrepresented backgrounds.
So it’s understandable the University of Wisconsin-Madison graduate student would like to counter those dynamics.
“If there are going to be people who deter people, why not have people who are like, ‘Hey, this is completely doable’?” says Haseltine, who is focusing on operations research while being co-advised by Professors Laura Albert (David. H. Gustafson Chair of industrial and systems engineering) and Bernard Lesieutre (electrical and computer engineering).
Haseltine and three colleagues are doing their part to spread that message through a high school outreach project funded through the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS).
Haseltine, industrial and systems engineering PhD student Veronica White, recent graduate Elizabeth Scaria (PhDISyE ’22) and Mary Ogidigben, a PhD student at Pennsylvania State University, have created a workshop and materials to introduce students from traditionally underrepresented backgrounds to the broadly applicable yet opaque fields of operations research and management science.
“Really when you get down it, there’s just not enough underrepresented students in our programs,” says White, who in her PhD research is using data and modeling to inform police response to the opioid crisis. “And the only way to do that is to reach them at a younger age and reach more of them.”
The foursome is holding a mix of in-person and virtual events throughout 2022, including a session for rising ninth and 10th graders as part of the College of Engineering’s Virtual Engineering Summer Program. To give the teenagers a tangible, relevant example of operations research techniques at work in the world, the project leaders showed them how to apply a classification algorithm to identify potential marketing influencers within a social network.
But by talking about her own research, or Haseltine’s work on election infrastructure protection, White hopes the group can also show students that operations research can help address serious pressing challenges.
“We have all these tools that we can utilize to help answer a lot of societal problems, and there just aren’t enough individuals that are able to then take this and help bring it back into mainstream society,” she says.
And, given numerous studies have shown diverse teams are more effective than homogenous ones, who better to solve those societal issues than a STEM workforce that better reflects the wider world?
“People’s life experiences gear them for how they solve problems,” says Haseltine. “Because my life experiences are so different than a lot of the people I’m in a lab with, I have a much different approach to solving problems. And that’s not just me—that’s every time I see a diverse group of people with varied backgrounds. They give you that perspective that you may have never considered before, because you just didn’t have those life experiences. And I think that’s something we really don’t talk enough about: The benefit of diversity and inclusion is not just to be a good person; it’s also to be more productive, to do better research.”
Top photo caption: Graduate students Veronica White (left) and Carmen Haseltine are part of a group that created a workshop and materials to introduce students from traditionally underrepresented backgrounds to the broadly applicable yet opaque fields of operations research and management science.