"From San Francisco, I'm Moira Gunn, and this is Tech Nation!"
--Why do people go into engineering?
I didn't think I was ever going to go into engineering.
I came from a family of History and English majors.
That was kinda like, you gotta be kidding. And yet,
we all knew I was great at math. I loved math.
Saturday mornings, I would just be doing math.
I thought it was fun. Actually, my friends had a big joke.
"Oh, it's Moira. Let's do math!"
As opposed to, "let's go to the movies!"
"Let's do math." I love math! I get endorphins from math!
I guess I would say college is when it really started to kick in.
Between my freshman and sophomore year,
I was a data input clerk.
In those days, we didn't have the screens you could just type on.
We had continuous paper, through what looked like an
electric typewriter, like an IBM Selectric typewriter.
And they would have notebooks,
lab notebooks, and then you would type...
I just really loved the computer, and I loved the data. And so
I went back in, and I said (as a sophomore)
I'd like to become a computer science major.
At that point, I didn't know what else I wanted to do in computer science.
The design group in Mechanical Engineering found out about me.
And he sent one of his graduate students
over to me, and said, "You know,
we have a big graduate group over here in Computer-Aided Design.
Would you consider coming over? You're really only several courses short of an Engineering degree.
I think you can do it better than the guys in my lab! So I think you need to come over!"
And that's where I ultimately got my Ph.D.
All of these people kept telling me,
"Oh my goodness, there's a woman!
What is like being the only woman in these meetings?" And finally I said,
"Why are you asking me? I have never been
in a meeting without a woman in it. You've gotta ask them
to see, is it different?" And it really wasn't any different.
We had all this work to do, and you had to be on time and under budget,
and come up with a brilliant idea every so often.
So it's not that different. We got the same assignments.
And then we just get down to work.
I had left NASA and become a consultant, which means I did all kinds of different things.
And Atari Computers have this new educational software.
They teach science, they teach technology, they teach other stuff.
And so they have a program put together where they cut out proof-of-purchase seals
from Post Cereal boxes,
in exchange for these Atari computers and software.
And we send spokespeople in. Would you consider doing it?
And I said, well why not? And they said, "you know, you're really good at this."
And I go, "How hard can it be? 'Buy cereal!' C'mon!"
So they really liked what I was doing, so that's how I got into it.
Just unbeknownst to me, that I was good at that.
And the nerd in the radio station when I was an undergraduate
had become the general manager.
And he said, "Yeah, you can start a show. Sure."
And so we started there, and it's funny how things grow.
I started interviewing people. I would get astrophysicists, and neuroscientists.
"Dr. Gunn, would you consider interviewing Linus Pauling?"
And I went, bingo! We got it! Something has happened here!
[RADIO EXCERPTS] "Coming up on Tech Nation, we'll take a look at Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
They're co-founders of Google."
--"Walter Isaacson is with us to talk about his latest book."
--"Salman Khan, the founder of Khan Academy."
--"Ed Catmull, the president of Pixar Animation."
--"Peter Diamandis, the founder of the X Prize Foundation."
[MOIRA] --It became what it is today, which is a lot bigger than I thought it was going to be!
It's really gratifying. And I'm very fortunate.
Got to talk to a lot of people, and I hopefully will talk to a whole lot more people from here.
I do encounter Purdue grads every so often.
And they frequently identify themselves to me. Go Boilers!
It's a big Purdue family, and
very infrequently are you going to be someplace and you don't find
a Purdue connection. It's fun to come back, and to see
these students, and they're so wonderful.
They're different kind of students than we were.
You don't have to say, "Oh I have to go and stand in line at the Computing Center
and do punch cards, and wait 20 minutes for it to come out."
It's all right there, wherever you want to be.
They all have smartphones! And so
they're doing tremendous work.
They're more organized, in a real sense. They can
organize themselves in a real sense.
This is a new generation, and a digital generation, that is.
It's going to be fun to see what they're capable of. It's going to be really great.
