Women in Engineering
25 May 2021 | Pratyush Ragini, Akhila Krishna K
Prof. Preeti Rao, working in audio signal processing and the senior-most woman professor in our department, talks about different stages of her life and how she discovered herself along the way.
It was true then and to some extent now that everyone tries to get into either Medical or Engineering. Students get funnelled into a college without too much active choosing or examining where their interests lie. And choices get made by themselves.
Due to her mother being a medical practitioner, everyone had assumed Prof. Rao would take up the medical stream. But being better at Maths and Physics drove her to choose Engineering. But once she entered the EE Dept. at IIT Bombay for a five year BTech program, the numerous electives helped her understand her inclination.
Everyone has heard about students enjoying the IIT non-academic life and making a lot of friends. But for the girls, it was a bit different. Being one of the six girls in a batch of 300, the feeling of loneliness and isolation used to creep in every so often. Senior guidance was also hard to come by. There was no internet in those days, and nobody owned a phone, so once the girls entered their hostel, they used to get cut off from everything. On a lighter note, she adds that bunking a class was difficult too as girls were the first to get noticed if missing from the classroom.
When asked about extra-curricular, she tells us how she was a voracious reader interested in writing. Getting involved with the department magazine, she got the opportunity to interact with some of her classmates. There used to be hikes organised by Gymkhana under the name of Himankan. During two such summers at Dehradun and Manali, she got to know a few seniors and juniors across departments. But on the department’s picnics, she talked to the faculty members’ families instead.
Talking about how she entered the field of Digital Signal Processing, she tells how to an extent, it was a method of elimination she used to decide. She also gives credit to the pedagogy and the curriculum. It was only the CS Dept. which offered a DSP course at that time, but it was oriented more towards computation. It was only during her MS when she had a proper DSP course. By then, textbooks on the topic had also started becoming available.
After completing her MS and PhD at the University of Florida, she returned to India, unlike many of her peers who stayed back in the USA. In those days, getting a job in India for PhD holders was almost impossible. Being treated ‘overqualified’ for industry jobs, she could only enter academia. So, she and her husband, who was also a batchmate of hers during BTech, together, applied to IITs. That is how they reached the beautiful campus of IIT Kanpur. There was only one woman professor in the department, and from her, she learnt a lot about life in academics. But in the classroom, she used to doubt herself and her capabilities, whether she would be able to deal with the overly competitive students’ questions. It felt like she’d gotten into the same place she had been trying to escape years ago. But no, she told herself, she was a Professor now and held a perspective that could help the students understand the subject. And soon enough she started enjoying the role she’d stepped into. But living five years away from their families, it was time to come back to IIT Bombay.
Passionate about building things with a tangible connection to society, Prof. Rao was more into applied work. For her Postdoc, she worked in the Speech and Hearing Dept. at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, her first step into the field of speech and audio signal processing. Moreover, her music processing journey started with some musician students who wanted to work on its technological aspect. Through exposure in workshops and conferences, her research group entered collaborations including a large funded project from the European Research Council with a prominent partner in Spain. They received funding to work on Hindustani classical music, wherein they had to find descriptors and signatures that define a genre. These can constitute information on the Raga or the rhythm structure, all through audio signal processing of the physical performance recording. Such interdisciplinary projects involved a rich interaction with many musicians and musicologists.
The team had also developed a demo tool where the user could hum a Bollywood song, and the software would retrieve the actual song from the database. It was a big hit and was showcased in the Science Express, a science exhibition on a train that travelled across India, and TechFest and Mood Indigo. One of the use cases of this prototype was to give singers feedback about their note accuracy, which led to the development of a score-based karaoke system and automatic auditioning tool. And that was the birth of Sensibol Audio Technologies. Funded by SINE IIT Bombay, they approached several Music Labels like Saregama and Sony Entertainment. More prototypes followed when they understood the many technological gaps in the entertainment industry that could be bridged using audio tools. Automatic lyric alignment to songs, and choosing representative clips, or hooks, for radio stations were a few amongst them. The team soon expanded and got into realising all these ideas as products. It was a challenging but illuminating experience, learning how to understand what a potential customer needs and customise one’s own work to find a solution. Close to completing ten years, the company has a total of around 15 people employed. Prof. Rao describes it as a great learning experience for both her and her student co-founders as they went about talking to investors explaining to them about their work and how it can benefit the industry.
The greatest thing, she says, about academia is this very flexible nature. There’s a lot of freedom to decide the kind of research one wants to pursue. One can choose to do more foundational research and publish excellent papers or deliver on projects and build things to create industrial value. Some people choose to write textbooks on their subject matter and develop labs. It’s all about finding something where one feels they can contribute best. When it comes to applied work, one can always take up industrial projects, or be an advisor or consultant in their work field. Besides work, she enjoys interacting with her research students. If she can mentor them to make them see the same excitement that she does, or advise them into looking at things from a new perspective, she considers her job as a teacher worth it. A common question women in her position are asked is if they faced any gender discrimination at any point in time. And the common thing amongst all their answers is that it’s a minor part of the challenges women face. In reality, it is their self-confidence that holds them back the most. If you're good at something, then there will always be people who would recognise your worth irrespective of your gender. But women, in general, are not very self-promoting. Around 15 years ago, Prof. Rao read about imposter syndrome. It affects women a lot more than it affects men because they tend to be more self-doubting. Wikipedia explains imposter syndrome as “a psychological pattern in which an individual doubts their skills, talents or accomplishments and has a persistent internalised fear of being exposed as a ‘fraud’.” She realised how she had faced these doubts at different points in her life, be it cracking JEE, answering questions others were unable to, or when she started teaching for the first time. This self-doubt is the biggest enemy to women because it becomes that much harder to grab the right opportunities and get ahead. But like every coin has two sides, this one does too. The good that comes out of this is the sense of duty that develops, which is vital in any aspect of life.
She advises students to really plan their future and not just wander into things. “There are a lot of options, and you shouldn’t think that this is the best opportunity and take it just like that. Think about what's good for you and what you really want to do and make the best decisions possible. It matters because these decisions eventually shape your career. Compromising too much is a loss to everyone; you’ll be unhappy and the society, too, will be at a loss because you could have contributed positively somewhere else. Don’t be overly critical of yourself and don’t underplay your strengths. Talk to people. Your faculty are good judges; they have experience with many people and can tell your strengths and weaknesses. And it’s important to take those outside inputs besides examining yourself, to figure out and get clarity about what you want to do. It can be academics, industry or a field completely different from engineering. It should be something that you look forward to getting back to and you feel bad if you are away from it for too long.”