"Sometimes it's hard to be female in computer science," Lori J. Park '96 says. "I didn't take C.S. 50 so I only met [Seltzer] when I was applying to be a C.S. 50 [teaching fellow]. I felt pretty frustrated with C.S. at the time. I told this to [Seltzer], and she took time to explain things to me [and] have me attend her research group."
Teaching
Seltzer came back to Harvard and, more generally, to academia to teach. When asked what it's like to stand up in front of a group of Harvard students and teach them about computing, Seltzer--dressed in blue jeans and a t-shirt--rocks back in her computer chair and howls: "It is a trip. It is a real trip."
She remembers the day she realized her students likely view her as she saw her own professors.
"I was standing in front of my first class and I was teaching C.S. 161 and it was just this really weird mind-warp thinking about how I used to view my professors when I was a student," Seltzer says. "Then it hit me, 'My God, these people take me seriously.'"
Seltzer lets her experience at Harvard as an undergraduate inform her teaching today, particularly with grading. Grades have rapidly inflated since she was here in the early '80s, Seltzer says.
"When I was a student here, a B+ was a good grade. Now I get people in my office in tears over B+'s," Seltzer says. I have a really hard time with that because my value system is based on when I was here. You can tell me things have changed since 1979 but somehow I don't think they should have."
Despite the tough grades, students enjoy Seltzer's teaching.
"Seltzer was a wonderful professor," says Adam L. Jacobs '99 who took C.S. 50 from her last year.
"She demanded a lot of audience participation in lecture.... It was a pretty big class--met in one of the big [Science Center] lecture halls, had several hundred students," Jacobs says. "But once I met her [in office hours], introduced myself to her that one time...[and] thereafter she always remembered my name. When she called on me in lecture she would call me by my name."
Students also appreciate Seltzer's candidness and her availability.
"[Seltzer] doesn't buffer you from the truth. Basically, if you're slacking off, she'll tell you. If you're doing a great job, she'll tell you," Park says.
"Though the course material is generally very difficult, she regularly takes time out to meet with students who need extra help," says Sam A. Yagan '99 who also took C.S. 50 with Seltzer. "Last year I was one of those students who struggled with C.S. 50. As I look back through my saved messages, I count more than 30 e-mail messages from her."
Though Seltzer loves to teach, research and publishing are a necessity to getting tenure.
"Unfortunately in the academic world you are measured by how many papers you write," Seltzer says. "The publish or perish phenomenon is very real."
As a computer scientist, Seltzer writes software (most of which is given away for free on the World Wide Web) and writes papers about the lessons learned from writing the software.
Seltzer usually teaches Computer Science 50: "Introduction to Computer Science" during the fall semester, but this year she is on leave at Radcliffe's Bunting Institute doing research and programming. Last year she received the Radcliffe Junior Faculty Fellowship, which is designed to increase the number of women faculty tenures by giving one woman junior faculty member a year teaching relief to do research.
Seltzer work at the Bunting is a continuation of her research at Harvard which currently is building and evaluating an operating system (hopefully to be finished soon) that she designed. She has also done research on the growth of the Web, trying to quantify its staggering sprouting and to design strategies to keep pace with its growth.
But Seltzer says that Harvard students are the University's biggest draw.
"The greatest disappointment in not getting tenure would be not having the contact on a regular basis with the students," Seltzer says. "Harvard does have this one little carrot--the student. They're what makes this ridiculous long hour, low paying job a lot of fun."