Interview: LBNL's Kathy Yelick on the Importance of STEM Education

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The Energy.GOV site is featuring an interview with Kathy Yelick, Associate Laboratory Director for Computing Sciences at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Yelick is a strong supporter of STEM education efforts around Science, Technology, Engineering and Math, and she offers advice for young people looking to get into science.

I recommend that people explore as many options as they can and try to find something they love to do; I consider myself very fortunate to have such a career. It’s also important to remember that beginning programming courses, just like elementary school arithmetic, start with very basic problems. Large computing systems and software projects involve teams of people working over multiple years, so you may not see the impact of what you can do right away. And while the individual puzzle-solving element of programming never disappears, the opportunity to work with other smart, creative people, often with expertise quite different than your own, is an important characteristic of many computing projects that you can get involved with later in your career.

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