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I’m Hillery Hunter. I graduated with my bachelor’s in Electrical Engineering from
Illinois ECE in 1999, master’s degree in Electrical Engineering in 2002 and my PhD
in 2004. I now work at IBM Research in Yorktown Heights, New York and my general area of work
is in computer architecture. What I really enjoy about the work that I’m doing now
is the interdisciplinary nature of it, as well as the strategic aspects – we get to
look at a lot of future trends and try to understand where technology is going and if
there are going to be changes in technology we try to work on forecasting how the rest
of the system and the software need to adapt in order to deal with those changes so that
we can address things in an integrated way. So I think that the core of the ECE curriculum
has been useful to me as I reach out and collaborate with scientists in neighboring fields – If
I hadn’t been given a strong foundation in the basics, and the ability to then derive
information from that, the ability to interact with people in adjacent fields, I would have
had a lot harder time working on the types interdisciplinary projects that I do now.
One thing that I have observed personally is important for women in computing fields
is the ability to find something where they feel that there is real world impact and I
think there is also an importance in being able to explore and have a certain flexibility.
The importance of the ECE engineering core is really that it enables you to build off
of it. If you don’t have a strong foundation, you’re not going to be able to do things
that are more interesting.