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November 22, 2004 Vol. 75, no. 8F
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| EECS alumna, Lekha Wickramasekaran
(B.S. ’74), left, and her daughter Neha (B.S. ’98). Lekha
was the first woman inducted in Cal’s HKN chapter and advises
women engineers: “You need to pay attention to other things
in life. Don’t sacrifice your home life.” |
Not just
for the boys: EECS alumna breaks ground for women engineers
In 1973, a woman engineer around campus was as unusual as, say, a computer
on your desk. That didn’t intimidate EECS alumna Lekha Wickramasekaran
(B.S. ’74). Not only did she enroll in the male-dominated engineering
college where she was often the only woman in class, but she excelled.
She completed her last two years in a single year (21 credits per semester)
and was the first woman inducted into the Cal chapter of Eta Kappa Nu
(HKN), the electrical engineering honor society, all while raising her
newborn baby.
“I must have been a workaholic and stupid,” she says of that
busy year. “But I managed with the help of my husband.”
Wickramasekaran transferred from George Washington University to Cal
in the autumn of 1973 and not long afterward, gave birth to her son,
Previn. The new arrival prevented her from registering for classes herself,
so her husband did it for her. Luckily, the registrar assumed Lekha
was a man’s name.
“Since I was often the only girl, they treated me like a freak,”
she says, “or they treated me like a lady, holding doors for me.
But when I proved myself it didn’t matter.”
HKN soon took notice and invited Wickramasekaran to join. She’d
never been in a sorority or fraternity, she says, and during the initiation
rite, the officers kept referring to her as “brother.”
“I wasn’t intimidated,” she says. “I used to bully
and tease the boys and we got along well.”
After graduation, Wickramasekaran earned her master’s degree in
computer science at UCLA (again, in one year while pregnant with daughter,
Neha) and landed her first job at Rockwell International, designing
the cockpit interface of the first space shuttle and flight simulations
for the astronauts. Later, she co-founded a company called Software
Analysis and Management & Co. while working at the Jet Propulsion
Lab-
oratory in Military Intelligence. Today, she is her own franchisee,
owning two UPS Stores.
Cal alumna Neha Wickramasekaran (B.S. ’98) has followed in her
mother’s science-inclined footsteps. Instead of engineering, Neha
majored in applied mathematics and went on to work with a team that
helped design the visual effects of movies like Matrix Reloaded, Matrix
Revolution, and Catwoman.
“Growing up, I never thought there was something I couldn’t
do,” says Neha. “My mom leads by example. It helps to know
that it’s been done before.”
So what is Lekha’s advice for today’s women engineers? Engineering
careers can often be challenging and time-consuming, she says, so balancing
work demands with the rest of life is difficult. But, she says, “You
need to pay attention to other things in life. Don’t sacrifice
your home life.”
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