Computing Educators Oral History Project:

"Well, Spelman is an all women's college as well. So I went from a girl's high school to a woman's college. And the thing about being in that kind of environment is that nobody thinks you're odd if you want to do well in math or science. Nobody thinks you're unfeminine or anything, they just encourage you. So there were a number of us who went to school together as math majors. A couple went to medical school actually with the math major and they added biology to it. Some women went on to get the higher degrees. But it was never any question that we could not do it. That we would do it. Our teachers were very encouraging. One in particular, Dr. Etta Falconer, was one of the first black women to get a PhD in mathematics" Link to this audio snippet in new window

"It was a bit of a challenge. Georgia Tech was a school that was traditionally male, traditionally white. So I sort of felt like I was too old, the wrong color, the wrong age to be going there. There was nobody that looked like me. Very few women in the program. And there were maybe 110 students and maybe 8 of them were female in the PhD program when I went. And most of them were in their 20s, and I had a college age daughter. So I obviously wasn't in my 20s. And it was kind of difficult in the sense that, you hear people talking about the isolation, how people don't want to form study groups with you. I would end up doing projects by myself because I couldn't get a partner. And there were a couple times when I thought, you know I don't really want to do this, I can go back to [teaching] high school, I know how to do that. But I stuck it out." Link to this audio snippet in new window