We are pleased to recommend Blaine Dinkin, a graduating student in our Master of Science in Health Care Policy & Management program, for the CMWA Scholarship Award. Blaine is a dedicated student who is actively involved in our Heinz College community and has demonstrated a clear commitment to the advancement of women in her field.

Blaine has challenged herself in the classroom and is an academic role model to other students, particularly when it comes to being an active participant and seeking out support resources. She is an enthusiastic participant in the classroom – speaking up to make meaningful comments and asking probing questions. Blaine is very aware of her academic strengths and weaknesses, and has sought out support in her challenging quantitative courses. She also encourages her colleagues, particularly the first year graduate students, to similarly seek out support and not shy away when confronting challenging subjects. She has performed extremely well academically, achieving a 3.52 cumulative QPA thus far and receiving glowing feedback from her instructors.

Blaine is an active participant in our Heinz College health care community. She is the Vice President of the Heinz Health Care Club, and in this role, she has successfully planned and executed a number of events including invited speaker sessions and student treks. Blaine also recognized that many of her colleagues seeking employment in the health care industry had concerns about balancing their careers and family life, so spearheaded a Women in Healthcare event planned for later this Spring.

Next year, Blaine will be working at Allegheny Health Network as an Administrative Fellow. Administrative Fellowships are highly competitive and sought-after positions in the health care administration field, and post-graduates completing these programs move quickly up the ranks within leading health care institutions. We are confident that Blaine will continue to be a stellar role model as she moves into industry leadership roles and are excited to see where her career takes her!

I am thrilled to nominate Maggie Mertz to represent Dietrich College at the Carnegie Mellon Women’s Association (CMWA) Spring Awards Reception. Maggie is one of the most exceptional students I know and her name came to mind immediately when I got your call for nominees. She has demonstrated a commitment to the advancement of women in their academic pursuits throughout her career at CMU, both inside and outside the classroom, and I am confident she will continue to champion women in her post-CMU career. Maggie has devoted herself to advancing the cause of women in film, where female perspectives are historically marginalized. She intends to continue her education at Cambridge where she will study gender and film while pursuing a Masters of Philosophy in Film and Media Studies and the CMWA’s scholarship will aid her in that endeavor.

Maggie, who has a primary major in Global Studies, an additional major in Creative Writing, and minors in Animation and Special Effects and Film and Media Studies has supported the advancement of women through her scholarship. Maggie stands out because of her intense interest in approaching gender from a multi-cultural and creative perspective. Maggie is currently working to complete her Senior Honors Thesis, “Breathing Words,” which is a short narrative film that critically analyzes the concept of female friendship in a cross-cultural context. Her work is especially important because female friendships are rarely portrayed in film, and when they are, they are almost invariably women from similar socio-economic and cultural backgrounds. Maggie has further explored this issue through her capstone Global Studies research seminar paper, which compared the representation of and reaction to female friendships in films produced in the United States and Romania. She has also studied these issues in her coursework at CMU and through studying abroad in Cuba and in Copenhagen. Maggie intends to have a career in the film industry and has built a solid foundation of theoretical and conceptual knowledge about gender in film and women in society.

Maggie has also applied her knowledge of the issues women face in film outside the classroom. She founded a female film group, Momoka Studios, which has produced three short films and two short documentaries. Momoka Studios is a space where women can express themselves artistically, and considering the paucity of female directors and producers, Maggie’s contribution to women at CMU is significant. Moreover, Maggie has led by example in challenging assumptions about women’s roles on campus.

As a member of CMU’S ballroom dance team, she became the first woman to dance in the lead role while wearing a tuxedo – a role and attire traditionally reserved exclusively for male dancers. Maggie overcame resistance from her own teammates who feared backlashes from judges for such an unorthodox move to make a bold statement about egalitarianism and gender equality.

As I mentioned above, Maggie intends to continue her studies at Cambridge, where she will further equip herself to advocate for women in film. Her career goals are to help women find their voices and find expression through film, which has traditionally been a male-dominated profession. Maggie would be a worthy recipient of the CMWA’s award, which would not only reflect her inspiring accomplishments here at CMU, but highlight her potential to bring change to a field that desperate needs it.

We would like to nominate Tanvi Bajpai as our recipient of the Carnegie Mellon Women’s Association Award from the School of Computer Science. I received three letters supporting her nomination, and these letters attest to her impact in our community as a role model for all of our students.

Her academic advisor, Anil Ada, wrote that Tanvi “is the very rare talent who will positively influence the culture of the environment she is in.” He also describes her impact on our community of undergraduate teaching assistants:

“Tanvi has created and organized several workshops on being a teaching assistant, doing research, and the imposter syndrome. Her work as a teaching assistant (TA) is remarkable. When she first worked as a TA for the introductory discrete math course, she was the only female TA. Two semesters after, with her leadership, the course had 12 female TA’s. As a result of what she is doing, I am also seeing a great positive impact on the diversity of my course staff in 15-251 Great Ideas in Theoretical Computer Science. Thanks to her, many more females are applying to be TA’s.”

She acts like an informal academic advisor to many. Furthermore, she has given many students the confidence to get involved in research and teaching. Anil also says:

“Tanvi is a very talented teacher. She has an amazing power to tell stories and get people to listen to her. Usually students make use of office hours to ask questions about homework questions. As a TA, Tanvi was able to successfully create “conceptual” office hours in which students are not allowed to ask any homework questions. She has like 50 students come to these conceptual office hours which is quite extraordinary. In the course that I teach, our conceptual office hours are attended by only a handful of students.”

Our director of Women@SCS and SCS4ALL, Carol Frieze, sent me a very enthusiastic letter supporting Tanvi Bajpai for this award. Carol says, “she has designed and created programs aimed at improving inclusion and diversity, she has sustained these efforts, and, what is so important, she has trained younger students to keep up the good work after she graduates from Carnegie Mellon.” Carol also lists a number of programs and activities that Tanvi has led or organized:

“Tanvi is heavily involved in our Big/Little Sister’s program as a mentor to several little sisters. She has also taken the lead on the Graduate Undergraduate Sisters program which matches undergraduate students who are thinking about graduate school with graduate students.

“She partnered with a graduate student leader to organize research round tables where undergraduates can come along and explore the range of graduate programs in SCS. Undergraduate women can get detailed information about life in graduate school and see how it differs from life as an undergraduate.

“Tanvi, a lead Teaching Assistant in SCS, was concerned about the low number of Teaching Assistants (TA’s) who are women. She organized sessions in which panels of current female TAs discuss their experiences and the benefits of being a TA. This encouragement for undergraduate women, added to the efforts of our faculty, greatly increased the number of female TAs. Professor Garrod, who oversees the TA program said that, overall, Tanvi is our most proactive student at creating an inclusive environment for women within our TA program. She's personally responsible for changing the recruitment process for several of our CS courses, and she's organized numerous community-wide events to help bring more women into the TA program.

“She put together a panel of leading women in SCS who discussed how they overcome (on a daily basis), their imposter feelings and low confidence levels, so that they are not held back in assuming leadership opportunities.”

Carol concludes by saying that “She shows initiative, creativity, perseverance and desire to work for the benefit of the greater community. The fact that she has sustained her extra- curricular efforts as she prepares to head to graduate school is truly impressive.”

Besides her classes, her TA work and her participation in Women@SCS and SCS4ALL, Tanvi managed to find time to work on research with R. Ravi in the Tepper School. Ravi sent me a letter, saying “I am impressed by Tanvi’s resolve for doing research. She is thoughtful in our research meetings and prepares for them by taking and sharing extensive notes on the papers she reads. She serves as an excellent role model for a STEM woman, and I am very happy to have the chance to work with her.” He describes how she began working with him and the projects that followed:

“She was the only undergraduate student who audited my special topics doctoral course in Combinatorial Optimization in the Spring of 2016. After that, she approached me to work on research.

“I started her off on a problem of defining a new measure of diversity of recommendations, when items being recommended are grouped into overlapping categories (such as movie genres) and similarly, users being recommended items are grouped into overlapping types. Tanvi was quick to grasp the problem and extend the work of a doctoral student to this situation. Her contributions include coming up with new notions of system-wide diversity and adapting existing algorithms for maximizing diversity based on minimum-cost flow to cases of her problem that are polynomially solvable.

“Last year, Tanvi has started working with me on a new combinatorial problem of ranking respondents according to the quality of choices they make on several selection problems. Each selection has an ordered set of choices and better respondents choose better choices. This problem comes up as a primitive in a student-question ordering system that crowd-sources quiz questions. Tanvi has continued to be an active member of a research group including another faculty member and a master’s student and contributed over the year to developing the discrete aspects of the project.”

Finally, Tanvi manages to find time to participate on panels and lead SCS tours when we have visiting families for Turn Tartan Overnight and April Yield events. She regularly stops outside of my door with tour groups to talk about academic advising, and I am always happy to see her. She speaks extremely well about SCS and CMU and her experiences here, and I consistently hear from parents that they are so impressed with her abilities and achievements. I tell them that not only is she a hard worker, she looks out for others and tries to lift them up too. Her impact improving our community resulted in her receiving the 2018 Mark Stehlik SCS Alumni Undergraduate Impact Scholarship.

Although we have several women in our graduating class that have achieved a great deal and have made a lasting impact on SCS, we feel that Tanvi Bajpai is the best example of female leadership in our college, and we are happy to nominate her for 2019. As a final note, we know she has even greater successes ahead: she is currently choosing between Northeastern University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for her PhD studies.