2026 Keynote Address

Wow, good morning and congratulations everyone.

I'm deeply honored to receive the Robert Fletcher Award and also to have the opportunity to address the Thayer School graduates this morning. I feel so lucky to be able to talk to such a talented group of people just as you are about to move on to the next stage of your life. You have gained much knowledge and experience that will enable you to have significant impact throughout your career. One of your key experiences has been learning and thriving in a diverse community, and I hope you will use that experience to be a change agent who promotes encouragement and support for members of diverse groups wherever you are.

I have spent most of my life trying to learn how to create societal change. Much of that comes from being born female instead of male. I was the second daughter out of four in my family and I was absolutely sure that I was supposed to have been born as a boy. At that time—so I will be 75 next month, and, thank you—and at that time, life was very gendered. Actually today it's still pretty gendered, but it's not nearly as gendered as it was 75 years ago. Girls weren't supposed to be good at math, they weren't supposed to want to explore wilderness, to build things in a workshop, or to argue ferociously with their parents. 

Fortunately, my father also thought I was supposed to be a boy so he encouraged all of my boy-like activities, except for arguing with him. For many years I was sure that when I woke up the next day I would be a boy but around the age of nine years old I gave up. When I finally accepted that it wasn't going to happen, I decided that if I couldn't be a boy I could try to make it easier for girls to have access to the kinds of things that boys liked to do. 

I planned on majoring in engineering in college because I loved both art and math and I thought engineering was the best way to combine the two. At the last moment, and I actually—so I attended the University of Alberta, so I'm Canadian, eh—and in Canada you go to your home university. It's not one of these things where you do a college trip and you visit a lot of different places. You go wherever is closest, and I had won the provincial prize for the top student entering engineering that year. I'd also won a national prize called the Inco Scholarship, and this is long before there was online registration. 

So you would be walking around a gym where there were a couple representatives from each department, and you would be signing up for the courses in math and physics, et cetera, et cetera as you go around. And, when I got to the table with the math folks, they told me that engineering majors were not allowed to take the honors math courses, which of course were by far the best math courses. So on the spot, I changed from engineering to honors math. I gave up my engineering scholarship. There's just no way I wasn't going to take the best math courses.

There were no female math professors and, even though I did very well in all my math courses, several of my profs asked me why I wanted to be a mathematician, because there were no great female mathematicians and I had so many other talents. I'm very stubborn so this just served as encouragement to stay in math. 

Over time I realized that I wanted to change the culture of math so women would feel valued and supported. And as my career progressed, I realized culture change was needed in all the other STEM fields as well, and also that women were not the only people who felt excluded. We needed to make sure STEM culture embraced and encouraged everyone, including people of color, people with different sexual orientations, and people from low-income families, and many many other groups.

The main reason I decided to go to Harvey Mudd College as president in 2006 is that I thought its tradition of innovation in pedagogy and curriculum would let it demonstrate that all kinds of people underrepresented in STEM disciplines could thrive in one of the most rigorous undergraduate educations in the country. 

When I arrived, the student body was 70% male and 70% white, and most of the non-white students were Asian. After six years we were at 50% female and by the time I left, seventeen years later, we were at 27% white—so down from 70% to 27% white—and had become one of the racially most diverse colleges in the country. 

I just want to say, this kind of change, I mean, it's not something the president does. It's something that takes a huge amount of work by everyone, including the faculty, staff, students, alumni and the board. You have to have a community that embraces that change. And I'll just say when I first arrived at Mudd, ok, so I took the presidency—did I ever ask anyone that they cared about diversity? No. Why would they hire me if they didn't want somebody who wanted to do something about diversity? Well, they wanted to hire the dean of engineering from Princeton. They never asked me about diversity either. 

So I was sort of surprised when I arrived to find out that they weren't interested in diversity at all. But I was very lucky, because I had invited a person named Freeman Hrabowski who was the first black scientist to become president of an R1 university. At the time, he was president of the University of Marlyand, Baltimore County. And I had him speak in one of the strategic planning workshops that we did in my first three months as president. And one of the things I learned from that, is that somebody from the outside can say things and be heard in a way that, as president at Harvey Mudd, I couldn't possibly be heard. And he talked about his experience as a young black boy marching with Martin Luther King at the age of twelve. And all of a sudden the Mudd community went from "we're a merit-based institution, and the reason we don't have more women or people of color is they don't like a rigorous STEM education" to "oh my goodness, we could be diverse"! I don't think I understood the power of a voice of the outsider until that moment.

So, I often get a a lot of credit for increasing the participation of women in computer science and engineering majors at Harvey Mudd College. But what I want to tell you is, I was not the catalyst. And the reason I am telling you this story and I have her permission to tell this story, it's because I want you as graduates from Thayer to understand that even after you leave here and go on and start whatever you do next, whether it's going on to graduate school, or starting work at a company, or being a volunteer in Africa. Whatever you choose to do, you can be an agent for change.

So, the person who really deserves the credit for the change that happened in Harvey Mudd in my first year there, her name is Christine Alvarado, and she did her undergraduate degree at Dartmouth. She studied computer science there and went on to do her PhD at MIT. 

She had a fantastic experience at Dartmouth. She felt fully supported and engaged. When she went to MIT, she was doing her PhD in AI. Yup, they had it even back in the early 2000s. Well, actually, I know the term was invented here, a very long time ago. 

While she was at MIT, the male students told her over and over again, "you're only here, you only got in because you're a girl and you're not nearly as good as we are." Okay, it's sort of depressing that that still happened back in the early 2000s. Does it still happen today? Yeah, I'm sorry to say but not nearly as much as it used to. 

So when she joined as an assistant professor at Harvey Mudd in 2005—so one year before I arrived—and she found that only between 10 and 15 percent of our computer science majors were female, she decided to do something about it. Now, she was an assistant professor, she was brand new, she was by far the most junior person in the department. But she convinced the department to change the introductory CS course that every Mudd student had to take in their first semester.

In those days, students arrived in college with widely varying levels of CS knowledge and experience. Some, mostly male and mostly Asian and white, had a lot of experience, including a college course or two. Some had never taken a CS course or written a line of code. And of course females, people of color, and people from low-income families were overrepresented in the group with little experience. 

The students with less experience did significantly less well in the intro course and they assumed that they were just not good at computer science. So Piper, your story reminds me of this. Only, at the time they didn't go into a booth and meet somebody else who convinced them that they could solve problems. They just thought they weren't good at computer science. And so they wouldn't take the second course in computer science, CS 60, which was the thing you needed to do if you wanted to become a CS major. Christine Alvarado, the Dartmouth alum, persuaded the department to create a set of intro courses in which every student who was willing to work hard and accept help could learn that they were good at computer science.

The new approach to the intro course was launched in 2006, just as I arrived. There were two sections of CS 5, Gold and Black—so like white and green, the colors of Harvey Mudd. Gold was for the students with little or no prior experience, while Black was for the students with the equivalent of an AP course in CS before arriving at Mudd. 

Okay, the choice of the colors, gold and black, was really important. You would think that Gold would be the best course to get into, well it was, but Black was a good course too. There were students arriving with more than an AP CS course so they were put in a new course called CS 42, that covered the material from the first two courses in the sequence, CS 5 and CS 60. And if you are wondering why did they choose the number 42, you should read the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. 

Black and Gold covered the same CS material, but there were topics in Black that were deliberately ... because obviously these students had a lot more experience in computer science, and so you could go more quickly through the CS 5 material. But the concern was that you didn't want these students in Black to go into the same course as the students in Gold and have more understanding of the material in the next course. And so all of the extra material in Black was things like cryptography or computer graphics. Things that you would never see until, at the earliest, your junior year in the CS major. Thus, both the students from Gold and Black who chose to take the next course, CS 60, would enter it with similar levels of preparation.

This resulted in many more females going on to take CS 60, and by 2012—so six years after the new intro courses were launched—40% of the CS majors were female, up from 12% when I arrived. Of course there were other things we did to encourage women to major in CS, including arranging early internships with tech companies, taking students to the Grace Hopper conference (Christine Alvarado was also the person who started that), having lots of female speakers in CS seminars, etc. It also helped that we had increased the percentage of females at Mudd, but of all the things that were changed, the thing that had by far the most impact, was changing that intro CS class.

Well what about engineering? As female students who wanted to major in engineering saw the increased participation by women in CS, they also entered engineering in much larger numbers. I have to say, CS was doing summersaults to change their environment, to encourage women. Engineering was making almost no changes at the time. But eventually, the female students who went into engineering convinced the department that they had to make similar kinds of changes. So in the end, the engineering department changed its courses, changed the experience for first-year students, lots and lots of things, in order to make the women who majored in engineering feel embraced and supported. So I'm sure you realize that the reason I chose you to tell you about Christine's story is—a Dartmouth alum, a junior person who managed to change an entire college as a brand-new assistant professor. You can do the same thing.

Some of you might be thinking that Christine was a special person, was lucky to have chosen Mudd, or other reasons why the story does not really apply to you. Yes, Christine is special and was lucky—though perhaps not so lucky to have chosen to attend MIT at the time she went. But the truth is that each of you is special too, and you are lucky to have chosen to study engineering at Thayer School. Your success in having an impact on the world over the next few years will be partly the result of what you have learned at Dartmouth, but also the result of your commitment to continue learning and working hard, and being willing to ask for, and take, help when you need it. And also, being willing to help others. These are all skills you have developed and applied while at Thayer. 

You, every single one of you, is going to have an amazing future. 

Congratulations, and thank you so much.