Sheila E. Widnall ’60, SM ’61, ScD ’64

INTERVIEWER: Today is November 17, 2010. I am Karen Arenson. This interview is part of the MIT 150 Infinite History Project. We are talking this afternoon with Sheila E. Widnall, a professor of aeronautics and astronautics at MIT, and one of the Institute's 14 current Institute professors. She served as Secretary of the Air Force from 1993 to 1997, and was the first woman to head a branch of the American military. She was also the first MIT alumna appointed to MIT's engineering faculty, and the first woman to serve as chair of the MIT Faculty. She earned three degrees in aeronautics and astronautics from MIT: a Bachelor's, a Master's, and a doctorate, and served briefly as associate provost at MIT, and also as president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She holds three patents. Sheila, thank you for talking with us today. What has it been like to be the first woman to do so many things, and did you ever set out to be first?

WIDNALL: Well, it has been quite a ride. No, I don't think I ever set out to be first. I clearly had an incredible experience at MIT-- I'm still having an incredible experience at MIT-- and some of these things just seemed to happen naturally. I think I came at a time when many organizations were looking for women for their boards, for various positions in the organization, and I think I was the beneficiary of a lot of that.

INTERVIEWER: Some women who have made it to the top have not seen a need to help those following them. But you've worked to help other women make it in engineering and science. Why did you think that kind of help was important?

WIDNALL: Well, I think women can make a very special contribution to engineering and science. I think they, in many ways, have a slightly different approach. They're more multi-disciplinary, they're more multitasking. I think they bring a set of skills, and I think those complement, in many ways, their colleagues' and so I think they do bring something very special to the table, and obviously our society can benefit enormously if we use the brain power of our entire population.

INTERVIEWER: Do you think, as an engineer and scientist, that you were that different from your colleagues when you talked about multitasking and so forth?

WIDNALL: I really do. I mean, I think that many of the things I did were very traditional, but on the other hand, a lot of the committee work I did, a lot of bringing groups together, a lot of building consensus, teamwork, leadership, I think those are sort of special styles that I brought to those tasks, and so I think I really did benefit from a slightly different approach to things.

INTERVIEWER: You've described your life as, quote, surfing on the leading edge of a wave--

WIDNALL: Yes.

INTERVIEWER: Of heightened sensitivity and activity to increase the role of women in science engineering. You've also said that you were very fortunate. But it takes skill to stay on a surfboard and to ride big waves. What do you think were your most important skills, besides what you were just talking about?

WIDNALL: No, I do think the real belief that a decision made in a consensus manner is in fact a better decision than a decision made by single individual really allowed me to lead groups of people to accomplish a common goal. So I think that that was a skill that I find very useful. Also I'm obviously very enthusiastic about the things I did and about the many many organizations that I was involved with. So I think the enthusiasm, brought together with the leadership style, I think enabled me to do a lot of things.

INTERVIEWER: Was the leadership natural? Did you practice it growing up? Were you a leader in school? Or did you take any courses or read any books? Or--

WIDNALL: No, I never really thought about it. I'm not one of these people who had a life plan. I didn't have a series of steps that would bring me to some particular place. I should really share this with you, because when I tell people this, they always laugh, but my father rode bulls in the rodeo. And my mother was a juvenile probation officer. So I think that bringing those two genes together sort of gave me a certain leadership style. So I'm very quick to grab the problem or the issue and try to take it to the next level.

INTERVIEWER: Did you ever ride a bull?

WIDNALL: No, I never did. But I've done a lot of horseback riding.

INTERVIEWER: Was there a fearlessness? I mean, did your father have a kind of risk-taking attitude?

WIDNALL: He had to have one. I mean, you don't ride bulls if you're not willing to take risks. I mean, I can't think of very many things that are as dangerous as that.

INTERVIEWER: And you somehow had that kind of an approach too?

WIDNALL: Well, willingness to assert oneself. Willingness to take risks. Willingness to sort of assess the situation and decide what should be done. That's probably a useful skill.

INTERVIEWER: What role has MIT played in your career? What's been the tango you and the institution have danced?

WIDNALL: Well, MIT has been my life. I mean, I came to MIT as a freshman in 1956, one of 23 women entering the Institute, and at the time I came, it never occurred to me that there would be only 23 women at MIT. And it never occurred to me that houses could have windows on only two sides. I mean, those were total surprises. But, OK. So I saddled up, and became a freshman, and did all the things that are expected of freshmen.

INTERVIEWER: How did your professors treat you? And your male classmates, how did they treat you? What was it like to be one of those 23 out of 900 plus students?

WIDNALL: It was highly variable. I think my freshman adviser asked me why I had come to MIT, which I considered to be a little startling. On the other hand, there were certain members of the faculty who went out of their way to help me. I think my freshman math instructor brought me cookies when I was taking the final exam. That was very interesting. So I think there were a lot of people who really went out of their way to be helpful, and I think overall it was a very good experience.

INTERVIEWER: Did you ever feel discriminated against or picked on in any way, as you made your way through, both as a student and later as a faculty member and professional?

WIDNALL: No, I really don't think so. As I say, there were always a few people who would go out of their way to help, and so with that balance, then I could sort of overcome some of the other things that many people might have taken as slights. So overall, everything was fine.

INTERVIEWER: There were some small glitches, I think, along the way. When you started out, for example, I think you've talked about how somehow you ended up with one year contracts and maybe the pay wasn't quite as high as some of the men in the beginning.

WIDNALL: Oh, you're talking about as a faculty member. Yes, no, it was an interesting-- no, I think it was interesting. I can remember there were various times when MIT began to look seriously at the question of pay equity, and it was probably not a coincidence that in those years I always got a raise. So I thought, OK, I think I know what's going on here.

INTERVIEWER: Did you face more skepticism about being a woman in engineering outside MIT than inside, and were there ever men who didn't want to work with you?

WIDNALL: Not so much that, but I can remember-- you know, because I clearly had a very active consulting role, and I can remember being very well appreciated by the people who that I was actually consulting for-- but then, occasionally, people would come into a meeting and say, you know, who's that? Because I was a woman. But it didn't take very long before they began to understand the contribution that I was going to make to the problem at hand, and so I think he could overcome that pretty fast.

INTERVIEWER: There are many more women students and faculty members at MIT now than when you came as a freshman. Do the numbers surprise you in any way, either that there are so many more than fifty years ago, or that there're still so few tenured women faculty or women in engineering?

WIDNALL: Well, I think it's actually gratifying, and I would claim that I played a huge role in increasing those numbers. I mean, I was always very active in the whole question of the admissions of women, and there were various key moments in our history where we began to learn a little bit about issues such as is the math SAT a predictor of women as well as of men? Art Smith did some studies, and he determined by looking at the statistics that the math SAT underpredicted the performance of women. And MIT, being very data driven, made the obvious decision to take that into account on the admission of women, and the numbers reflect that. I think in one year, we went from 26 percent women to 38 percent women in one year.

INTERVIEWER: This would have been in the 1970's or 1980's, probably.

WIDNALL: I don't remember. Something like that. 1970's or 1980's. And so that was based on the data, and it was based on my strong belief that the women that we should be recruiting were the women that we were not admitting. That we had the pool, and we just had to do a better job of making the admissions decisions. So the numbers went way up. They went to 38 percent, and obviously there was the McCormick Building and the McCormick Dorm, and then of all the dorms went co-ed, so it didn't make any difference, and so MIT has went through all these different stages. I still think MIT, relative to other universities, is just way ahead in the percentage of women in engineering. I mean, there isn't another university in the country that has the same percentage of women across the engineering departments that MIT has. And I don't think most of them have any idea how we did it or what it's like. And I guess the other thing I think, is that the women undergraduates have transformed the faculty, and made it possible to not only increase the number women undergraduates, but increase the number of women graduate students and increase the number of women faculty. So I think that women undergraduates have been transformational.

INTERVIEWER: How? In what way?

WIDNALL: Well, I think basically, what happens is that the faculty get used to treating women as students. And there's a bit of a step there. You know, if you think about women in a different way than you think about men, you might not treat them the same way. But once you've got-- they're students, they do substantially excellent work, and so you start expecting the same quality of work from women that you do from men, and it becomes a natural mode of thought. I've talked to women graduate students who've come from other places, and they express surprise at the level of acceptance of women in the graduate school. Now this was maybe a few years ago, so it's probably even better now than it was when I talked to them, but then that feeds over into the recruiting and searching that the departments do for women faculty. So I lay it all up to the women undergraduates.

INTERVIEWER: Besides the presence of more women, how different does MIT seem now than when you first arrived? What do you think are the biggest differences?

WIDNALL: Well, of course I think MIT has moved with the developments in science and engineering, so when you can look at what's exciting now, how do people work together, probably a lot more interdisciplinary work, probably a lot more work at the interface between science and engineering and policy. Our lives are much more complicated than they would have been in the mid 1950's in terms of what does it mean to be an engineer, what kind of work do you do, how do you interact with the outside world. But MIT's moved right along with, and in some sense, led some of the changes that have gone on in engineering. So MIT is a very different place, but I think it's appropriately linked to society.

INTERVIEWER: Do you think its role in the world is different from what it was fifty years ago?

WIDNALL: Well, I think it understands the way it's viewed by the outside world. MIT, on a global scale, has got just a very unique reputation. I mean, people in other countries thinking about engineering, the first name that comes to mind is MIT. The second name may be something completely different and unpredictable. It could be Michigan, it could be CalTech, it could be Stanford, but when they think about the number one, it's MIT. And so I think our stature on the global scale is quite unique.

INTERVIEWER: Why do you think there aren't more women in science and engineering even today?

WIDNALL: Well again, I guess what I would recommend if people are thinking about that question, is I really do believe that women are motivated by the contribution they can make to society. And so I think the motivation to study engineering, you have to visualize the contribution you could make to society, and that's fairly complicated. I think maybe for a young man-- and I'm not sure that this is true today, as it was in earlier years-- is that they see engineering as a very fulfilling career in terms of the work you do and in terms of the salary that you make and the economic benefits. I think women think in slightly different terms. I think they think about the interaction that they can have as a professional with some of the important problems in our society. So I think it's up to us to demonstrate to women that they can make a quite significant contribution to problems of engineering, the environment, energy, new materials, new industries for our nation. And so I think you have to think about it in those terms. That's the case to be made, if you want to convince women to go into engineering.

INTERVIEWER: At one point, you and Professor Mildred Dresselhaus tried to attract more women to engineering at MIT with a special freshman seminar.

WIDNALL: Yes, we had a good time.

INTERVIEWER: Tell us about it. What did you do?

WIDNALL: Well, again, I think that's the same philosophy, is that we wanted the women students to gain an understanding of what engineers did. So we simply had this freshman seminar, and we had an enormous-- I mean, we must have had 90 students. And we would just bring in people who said they were engineers, and they would basically talk to the class for an hour. Some of them were professors, some of them were recent alumni. That was very effective. Some of them were people in industry. And we just gathered these people from all over, and the main mission was to talk in some detail about what they did, what their contribution to society was, what were some of the important problems that they saw, how did they attack them, how did their engineering education give them the tools to make some progress in some of these areas. I think it was very effective.

INTERVIEWER: And the students were all women? Or a mix of men and women?

WIDNALL: It was a mix. It was very interesting mix, because obviously we would welcome any students that wanted to take it, but it is the case that it was women and minorities. I think the minorities may have had some of the same sorts of questions. How welcoming was engineering as a profession? How could choosing engineering help our society? And so I think it was effective from that point of view. And we did it for several years. Hopefully somebody took it over and continued it.

INTERVIEWER: Do you know if it's still going on?

WIDNALL: No, I don't think specifically it's still going on, but hopefully MIT's moved to a slightly different place where we have other ways of talking to students about those issues.

INTERVIEWER: Do you know if the seminars succeeded in bringing more of the women and minorities into the engineering school?

WIDNALL: I don't know specifically, with respect to the individual students, but again, I still remember being blown away in those times. When I learned that, in chemical engineering, 73 percent of the undergraduates were women, and I just thought, wow. I couldn't imagine another engineering department in the nation having an enrollment that was 73 percent women.

INTERVIEWER: What was it about chemical engineering? Do you know?

WIDNALL: Well, I don't know. I mean, maybe it had something to do, again, with the kind of contributions you can make. This was before the revolution in biology, so it wasn't the interface with biology, but it was having to do with the kinds of work that you could do, maybe the kinds of contributions you could make. I think at this point, and I haven't checked it, but I think women are a majority in chemical engineering and material science--

INTERVIEWER: At MIT.

WIDNALL: At MIT. And probably civil and environmental engineering, and my guess would be biological engineering, but I haven't checked it. So that's half of our departments. And I think that's quite substantial.

INTERVIEWER: In the 1990's, MIT issued a report saying that women in its School of Science had been the victims of pervasive, if unintentional, discrimination. And I believe that there were subsequent studies at the other schools that found similar things. Were you surprised by these findings? Here it was, the 1990's?

WIDNALL: Well, you know, I think it's an issue that you just have to keep on the front burner. In any school at MIT, in any department at MIT, there is enormous-- what's the word-- competition for resources. You have new faculty coming, they want start-up salaries. You need space for laboratories, you need new equipment. If you're not in some sense always putting yourself forward as someone who needs the help of MIT in order to accomplish your goals, you might be on the second bench. And I'm not saying that women have a tendency to do that, but I think women are deeply committed to their careers and the contributions that they can make, and maybe are not banging on the door as much. And I give MIT a lot of credit for undertaking those studies. And, in some sense, it's an example. If we look at the history of women at MIT, it's a set of steps. It's not a smooth ramp. It's, you know, up, and then we do something else, we go along, and we do something else, we go along, we do something else. And it's been a series of steps. And I think that was one such step. And there've been quite a few.

INTERVIEWER: So now, MIT has a woman in the president's office.

WIDNALL: Right.

INTERVIEWER: Do you think much else has changed since that step occurred?

WIDNALL: Well, it isn't just a woman in the president's office. I mean, we have women department heads, we have senior women in all the schools. There's just a lot going on. So I think women-- and in some of the searches, we've hired a lot of new women faculty. And so I guess it's something I think we're keeping our eye on and continuing to make progress.

INTERVIEWER: Let's go back and took about your own path into engineering. Where were you born, and where'd you grow up? And what was your childhood like?

WIDNALL: Right. I was born on the final approach to McChord Air Force Base. And so, what that means is that the sky was full of airplanes. I'm basically from Tacoma, Washington, and of course Boeing in Seattle is one of the region's largest employers. The sky was full of airplanes, either Air Force airplanes or commercial airplanes. I guess my near-term career goals were always to finish my Bachelor's at MIT and go back and work for Boeing. I never in fact did that, but that was always the vision that I had.

INTERVIEWER: Once you were at MIT.

WIDNALL: Once I was at MIT.

INTERVIEWER: You didn't think in those terms as a child, though.

WIDNALL: Well, I was very good in math, and I sort of identified science and mathematics as a place I was going to go, and so I ended up at MIT, and then link that together with my interest in airplanes, and--

INTERVIEWER: Did you ever want to be a pilot?

WIDNALL: No. Well, not really. I mean, I love flying, but-- No, I really wanted to be an engineer. Wanted to--

INTERVIEWER: Are you a pilot?

WIDNALL: No. I'm not a pilot, but if you take off, I can fly.

INTERVIEWER: And you've done gliding.

WIDNALL: I've got gliding. Yeah, I've done gliding. I've pulled 9 G's, I've flown F-15's and F-16's and lots of different airplanes. I did land a trainer once, and I've taken other airplanes off, but obviously I'm not a pilot. I always have a pilot with me.

INTERVIEWER: Many of the men who went into engineering were tinkerers as children. They played with ham radios, or cars, or more recently computers. Did you tinker in any way?

WIDNALL: Yes.

INTERVIEWER: How?

WIDNALL: Yeah, I was a tinkerer. Well, this is a common pattern among women in engineering. I was the oldest child in a family without boys. So I was the boy. I was my father's right hand man. We painted, we did electrical work, we did plumbing, we did our--

INTERVIEWER: So he was very handy.

WIDNALL: He was very handy. Yeah, he was very handy. I was 21 years old before I found out that you could hire people to come into your house and do things. He did everything. Of course, our greatest contribution was when we painted the front porch the day my mother was having a dinner party, and everybody had to go in the back door. She was not very happy about that. But we were constantly doing things, and so I have a lot of hands-on experience about building things. And you know, it's not that you can't become an engineer without that, but if you also have that in addition to all the other skills, it really makes putting things together a lot easier.

INTERVIEWER: Did your girl friends, when you were growing up, do any of this? Were you conscious of the difference?

WIDNALL: No, I don't think so. I mean, I was different. But I was totally accepted by my friends. I mean, there was no sense of being isolated or by myself or something like that.

INTERVIEWER: So you were a tomboy too, you said.

WIDNALL: I was a tomboy. Yeah, I was a tomboy.

INTERVIEWER: Which meant what?

WIDNALL: Well, it meant basically that there were no girls in my neighborhood, so my playmates were boys. I guess that's what it means to be a tomboy.

INTERVIEWER: Did you play football and baseball?

WIDNALL: Yeah, I did play football. At a very young age. I didn't play football for a long time, but I did. At eight, nine years old, I did play football.

INTERVIEWER: Was your father still riding in rodeos as you grew up, or did he stop at some point?

WIDNALL: No, he stopped. He wandered around the West, riding in rodeos, and then he ended up in Tacoma where he had an uncle. And so he sort of settled down in Tacoma and met my mother, and they just basically settled down there. So he had stopped the rodeo thing when I was born.

INTERVIEWER: But his family had come from a ranch that didn't do well or something?

WIDNALL: Yeah, no, it's an interesting story. His family had a ranch in Colorado, and they lost it in the Depression, and he was sent out into the world with one horse and one saddle. Probably had a hat, too. And he was probably 18 years old, 17, 16, I don't know what, but he was sent out into the world on a horse. And no other resources. So clearly, he was going to be a ranch hand.

INTERVIEWER: And what was he doing by the time you were growing up? What kind of work--

WIDNALL: Well, he was working. I think he was going to college. It's a little hard to remember, because of course I was very young, but he worked at the shipyards during World War II. He was a sort of coordinator. He's very smart and very mathematical, so he was the one who would decide whether the construction crew was following the blueprints to put in a staircase or railing or whatever it is they were doing to build these aircraft carriers. There was a very large aircraft carrier shipyard in Tacoma, and that's basically where he worked. And he was going to college part time, so he got his Bachelor's degree, and then did a variety of things.

INTERVIEWER: Did he ever take you to any of those jobs sites?

WIDNALL: No, I can't remember ever going to the ship-- I was very, I mean, I was six years old. So I wasn't at any of those.

INTERVIEWER: And where did you go to school when you were growing up?

WIDNALL: I went to Catholic school. Grade school, St. Patrick's, and then I went to a Catholic girl's school. And there's probably something to that, because it is often said that women who go to school at girl's schools end up more independent, with more leadership qualities, less docile. No one's ever called me docile.

INTERVIEWER: But there was enough math and science for you to get a good grounding in them?

WIDNALL: Oh yes. I had fantastic teachers. I had the nuns, my algebra teacher, my principal-- extremely bright-- my chemistry teacher-- no. Very, very good education. I did, once I had decided to go to MIT, I did have to go to the local public high school to take physics, because physics was not offered in my high school.

INTERVIEWER: How much of a culture shock was that?

WIDNALL: Oh, it wasn't too bad. I mean, I was single-minded at that point, so it was--

INTERVIEWER: Were you the only girl in the class?

WIDNALL: I don't remember, actually.

INTERVIEWER: Probably one of a few.

WIDNALL: One of two or three. Something like that. But clearly I had a purpose, and I was sort of single-minded about that.

INTERVIEWER: Since you were growing up, you didn't ever get the feeling that girls weren't supposed to be good at math and science.

WIDNALL: No. And probably the girls' school helped with that. And my mother helped with that, my father helped with that, so no. I never had that view.

INTERVIEWER: How did you come to apply to MIT?

WIDNALL: Well, I actually joined at the-- I entered the science fair, and I won the local science fair at Tacoma.

INTERVIEWER: This is when you were a junior in high school?

WIDNALL: Junior in high school. And I went to the nationals in Cleveland, on a train, with Sister Albertine, my chemistry teacher. And there were a couple of other people who went with us. I mean, we picked up some guy in Montana and we had this big train full of high school kids that were on their way to Cleveland to go to the nationals. So I went to the science fair, and in connection with that, I think one of the judges was at MIT, had a PhD in civil engineering. And so he started kind of mentoring me, and he said, you should go to MIT.

INTERVIEWER: And this was a judge who lived in Tacoma?

WIDNALL: He lived in Tacoma. And a civil engineer, had a pre-stressed concrete firm, built big bridges and stadiums and all sorts of big things. And so he said, you know, you should go to MIT, and I said where's that? And he said that was in Boston. And so he basically ram-rodded that whole thing through and got me a scholarship. I was awarded the scholarship from the Seattle alums. There were thirty of us who were coming to MIT, and of course they were all boys, and I was the only girl, and they gave me the scholarship, so I thought, that's good. And so I came to MIT on a scholarship that the Seattle alums put together.

INTERVIEWER: And you've said that you had never heard of MIT before then. Had your parents or your teachers? Were they aware of what--

WIDNALL: No, not at all.

INTERVIEWER: Wow.

WIDNALL: Not at all. I think, in terms of the schools that I thought about, I probably would've maybe gone to Reed College or possibly University of Washington. But then, by the time I thought about MIT, then I also thought about University of Chicago, and by then I was thinking quite seriously about several different universities.

INTERVIEWER: What was your science project, and how did you come up with it?

WIDNALL: Well, my uncle had given me a big chunk of uranium. He worked for a big company in Colorado, I can't remember their name -- Union Carbide. He worked for Union Carbide in Colorado, and he had given me a big chunk of uranium.

INTERVIEWER: This is radioactive?

WIDNALL: Well, mostly the ore. I don't think it was terribly radioactive. It was mostly the ore, the uranium ore. It would have to be processed to make it really interesting from the point of view of being radioactive. But anyway. So he gave me that, and I thought, well, we could develop some kind of science project around the whole question of radioactive decay of uranium. It was not a science project as much as it was a demonstration project. I build models of atoms and kind of explained to people how the atoms decayed from uranium into the other substances. I think by today's standards it probably would not have won a prize. But Tacoma was just getting started in the science fair business.

INTERVIEWER: Today you might have done a very different project.

WIDNALL: I might have done a very different project. But anyway. So that's how I came to the attention of MIT and sort of launched my career at that point.

INTERVIEWER: Did doing the research for the project give you some kind of thrill or make you feel that this is what you wanted to do for the rest of your life? Was there any kind of ah-ha! experience connected with that?

WIDNALL: Well, I think so. Just the fact that scientists had a framework where they understood what was happening and what the implications were, and that it was a reliable predictor of the behavior of the materials. So I think it gave you a sense that there really was something here that one could build on. That there was knowledge that could be built on to develop things. So I think it gives you a sense of confidence that there's a body of knowledge that can be reliably acquired and can be used in a reliable way.

INTERVIEWER: And this obviously was way before the internet. Did you have guidance from your teachers or your parents? Or you went to the library? How did you find?

WIDNALL: I probably went to the library. I don't think anybody that I was involved with knew where to look. I'm sure I did all with the library.

INTERVIEWER: And that was probably a pretty cutting edge topic at that time?

WIDNALL: Well I think so. Certainly for a high school student. Certainly for a high school student, to learn about things like that, and what that meant for physics and what that meant for nuclear reactors and atomic bombs and all the other things that--

INTERVIEWER: Which weren't that old by then.

WIDNALL: No. By then they were not. They were not that old. So it was the beginning of thinking about science and engineering as sort of quantitative fields.

INTERVIEWER: But it didn't make you either a nuclear engineer or a material scientist.

WIDNALL: No. Not at all. Not at all.

INTERVIEWER: What were your first impressions of MIT when you arrived on campus? Do you remember?

WIDNALL: Well, first of all, the small number of women was just amazing. It didn't feel like a welcoming place for women, and I made a kind of conscious decision that I would worry about that later. That I wasn't going to take on that issue as a freshman or a sophomore. That I was just going to put that on the back burner, and I was going to get my degree, and then I would think about whether women were welcome in engineering. And I just postponed those questions.

INTERVIEWER: What about the experience made you conclude that it wasn't welcoming? Did this go back to-- well, you mentioned your freshman advisor.

WIDNALL: Well, yeah. Freshman advisor, people sort of saying, well, why are you here? Why do women come to MIT? Et cetera, et cetera. I just thought those were not very welcoming kinds of questions. But as I moved into the department, into the aero department, I got a lot of really good support from faculty, and so it sort of transformed the issue into excitement about the field.

INTERVIEWER: Did the women all stick together in any way? There was so few of you.

WIDNALL: I don't know if I'd use words stick together. I think I was always in a position where I was trying to help the other women students. I, as a sophomore, I became a TA. I stayed in the undergraduate women's dorm, I stayed in the freshman dorm, and kind of played the role of a big sister, kind of advising and mentoring the freshman that came in.

INTERVIEWER: Within the girls' dorm.

WIDNALL: Within the girls' dorm.

INTERVIEWER: Which was across the river?

WIDNALL: Yeah, Bay State Road. It was only like 20 people in the dorm. It was very small. So I stayed as an upperclassman, and then when we moved into Bexley Hall, I think I also stayed as an adviser. So I think most of the time when I was an undergraduate, I stayed in some kind of mentoring advising role for the new freshmen for the undergraduates. And that was something I did for my whole career.

INTERVIEWER: So there actually was a residential option for women upperclasswomen on campus, and that was Bexley?

WIDNALL: Yeah, that was Bexley. And I don't remember all the details, but yes. There was a wing at Bexley that was for women students, and I had a room in there with a roommate. At least once, maybe twice. It's hard to remember.

INTERVIEWER: How well prepared were you academically, once you got to freshman physics and chemistry and math? Did you pick up at a run, or did you--

WIDNALL: Oh, I would say medium. Medium. Certainly in my high school-- and I think this may have been very common in those days-- there was no calculus. I mean, we didn't do anything like calculus. We did algebra. We did algebra, we did trigonometry, we did physics, but it wasn't the physics with math that's done at MIT. So it was all new. It was all new, and I worked hard. And actually, one of the benefits-- you know, when you try to teach someone else, you learn more than they do. So when I was a freshman, I was always giving quiz reviews to the other freshman and trying to help them work through the problems, and I was the one that benefitted from that. I mean, I didn't do it for that reason, but it's a natural outcome of that.

INTERVIEWER: You've previously described taking I think it was the first physics tests and having an ah-ha! experience. Can you tell us about that?

WIDNALL: Well, yes. On my first physics test I got a very low grade. It's really hard to remember what that grade was. I don't remember. It might have been a 60. It might have been a 30. I actually don't remember what it was. But it was well below where I needed to be in order to do well in the course. And of course, that time was a time when freshman courses were graded. So this was definitely not a good grade. But I looked at that, and I tell the freshman this. When I'm a freshman adviser, I tell the freshmen this. I looked at that, and I did sort of have an ah-ha! And I said, oh, that's what MIT expects me to be able to do. Namely to solve problems that you hadn't seen before. Not to apply formulas, but to get to a deeper level of basically constructing a solution to a problem that you hadn't seen before. And that was really very important. And I think after that I did very well.

INTERVIEWER: How easy is it to judge high school students on their ability to make that kind of leap? I just wonder what the Admissions Office faces, if they're getting-- I don't know if they still get this-- but students who are used to plugging in formulas. But now you're really looking for a different kind of mind experience.

WIDNALL: Well, you know, hopefully some of these standardized tests are very helpful at sort of eking that out. A lot of the students that we get today have quite extensive internships, examples of projects that they've actually carried out, and so I think the students that we're seeing today are going well beyond just kind of plugging in formulas. And hopefully the high schools have improved, so that a student who's only able to do that is not going to get an A in his physics course. And I think that we're challenging the students a lot more. But it is a little overwhelming. I mean, MIT is getting an enormous number of applications, and trying to sort that out and choose the 10 percent of the applicants who should be MIT students is very challenging.

INTERVIEWER: How many of the other women students in your class made it? Did most of them stick with it? Or did all of them drop by the way?

WIDNALL: Yeah, it's hard to remember. I guess my gut reaction to that is certainly at least 50 percent graduated. Maybe more. Maybe 60 percent. I think a couple flunked out. I think a couple left for various reasons. I think at that time only one-- of course, this was a time when women didn't go to graduate school. Actually, engineers didn't go to graduate school. It was very unusual for an MIT student to go immediately to graduate school. Most of them went out to work. And I think it is the case that only one other woman went immediately for her PhD. There was only one woman. So that would leave maybe ten to twelve women who went out into the workforce.

INTERVIEWER: Were you involved in any extracurricular activities when you were a student?

WIDNALL: I think so. I mean, it's very, very hard to remember. Very hard to remember. I was--

INTERVIEWER: Did some student government, maybe?

WIDNALL: I did some student government stuff. I think I was in charge of something called a Public Relations Committee. We published a newsletter, we did interviews with faculty, and I'm sure there were other things that I was involved in. As I said, the whole issue of mentoring other women students was a big part of the activities that I was involved in.

INTERVIEWER: Was the social life for the few women good?

WIDNALL: Oh, it was good. Yes, it was very good.

INTERVIEWER: And you ended up marrying a classmate?

WIDNALL: Somebody who was actually a year ahead. Yeah. A year ahead. No, I think the MIT women students, obviously, we all had a good time.

INTERVIEWER: How did you and your husband meet?

WIDNALL: We didn't actually start going out 'til I was a senior and he was a graduate student. But we knew each other for the whole time. Anyway, he was a fraternity brother who lived across the street dance, and I sort of knew him, but we didn't do any dating until really the end of my undergraduate years.

INTERVIEWER: You were just finishing up your doctoral work when McCormick Hall was built to house women undergraduates.

WIDNALL: I'm not sure that's true.

INTERVIEWER: Well, it came online--

WIDNALL: When did McCormick come?

INTERVIEWER: In about 1963 or 1964.

WIDNALL: Really? I thought it was much earlier than that.

INTERVIEWER: Nope.

WIDNALL: Yeah. I mean, because that was the big-- well no, I guess that's right. That was the big issue with respect to the admission of women students, up to the--

INTERVIEWER: And then they built the second wing in 1968 I believe it opened, and then dorms went coed in about 1970.

WIDNALL: Yeah. Right. I think earlier there was this feeling that if they couldn't house the women in women's dorms, they were not going to admit women, and so then they got the contribution to build McCormick Hall and then they were able to increase the number of women and then the coed--

INTERVIEWER: Were you aware of all that discussion? And did you have any reaction to it, and to the decision to build the hall?

WIDNALL: Oh, I was very much in favor of it, obviously. Yeah, I was aware of it. And I can't remember how or why, but yeah. No, I was fairly active as quote a representative of women students to the higher administration. I mean, for example, when Killian became science adviser, I was within that small group of students to whom he made the announcement. Again, it had to do with student government. And so I was an interface between students and the central administration, and so yeah. I was very well aware of everything that was going on.

INTERVIEWER: When you entered MIT, was aero and astro your plan in terms of major?

WIDNALL: Well, probably not. Again, coming in as most MIT students did in those days, I probably was thinking physics and that related to the science project that brought...

INTERVIEWER: Even with Boeing back home?

WIDNALL: Yeah.

INTERVIEWER: McChord and--

WIDNALL: Right. But by the end of my freshman year, it was clear that I wanted to go into aeronautics.

INTERVIEWER: And you said the department was generally pretty welcoming?

WIDNALL: Yes. Very, very welcoming.

INTERVIEWER: And you had mentors there? Or--

WIDNALL: Yes. I had several mentors. Professor Holt Ashley was an adviser. Professor Jimmy Moore was an adviser. They were extremely welcoming.

INTERVIEWER: Do you have any sense of whether aero and astro is any different from other engineering departments in its welcoming women?

WIDNALL: No. I really don't know. I suspect that every department has got several faculty who are very welcoming, and others that don't even notice.

INTERVIEWER: And how much do you think it was a matter of your being a very, very good student, and their delighting in very, very good students, and how much do you think it was wanting to reach out and be more inclusive and you were so unusual in that respect?

WIDNALL: I think probably being a good student was a big part of it. I truly was one of the top students in the class, and so obviously I got a lot of encouragement for that. No, my adviser sort of said, well, you should definitely go to graduate school. Which obviously is very uplifting for any student. If your advisor picks you out and says you should go to graduate school, there's obviously a very nice message in that.

INTERVIEWER: Was that a hard decision, to stay and go to grad school? Did you think twice?

WIDNALL: No, not really. I think at that point I understood that, if I wanted to accomplish what I wanted to accomplish, I needed another layer of courses, and that what I got as the undergraduate, although very valuable, it wasn't all there was. And I needed, I wanted more.

INTERVIEWER: And your notion at that point of what you thought you wanted to accomplish? How would you characterize that?

WIDNALL: I never looked that far ahead. It just seemed to me that going to graduate school was the right thing, and working with these particular professors was obviously the right thing, and I really had great enjoyment. I can't say I even looked beyond that. I mean, I didn't think about being a faculty member. I just, again, probably thought I was going to go to work for Boeing. I thought, OK, we'll get this PhD, and then we'll go to work for Boeing.

INTERVIEWER: And by then you were married.

WIDNALL: Yeah, I was married by then. I was married by then, and I think it's true that you're not so mobile when there are two of you. And so it probably would have been a much more complicated career decision to sort of weigh what could the two of us do together that would make sense.

INTERVIEWER: What was your experience like as a graduate student, and was it very different from your undergraduate years?

WIDNALL: I don't think so. Again, I was working with the same faculty that had been so supportive with me as an undergraduate. I think the issues were intellectual. I got plenty of intellectual support. I really enjoyed what I was doing. Taking a lot of good courses, graduate school. Several of my classmates were people I had gone to undergraduate school with, so we were very good friends. We could take courses together, we could compare notes, and help each other make decisions, so it really was a very supportive environment.