The Fields Institute Turns Twenty-Five 170725 Final book with covers | Page 138

116 Sheila Embleton My first paying job, the summer when I was 15, was sponsored by the forerunner of NSERC and was to be as a research assistant in the Department of Mathematics in the University of Ottawa, which came with the added bonus of a quick course in how to program in a new programming language, WATFOR. As my supervisor did not have any projects or assignments for me, and bored with wandering the hallways, I talked myself into a job as an operator in the Computer Centre. Here I got to meet large numbers of “users” of mathematics from many different departments and learn the practical skills that stood me in good stead later at university when the Computer Labs would run “unattended” on weekends. This meant that if a keypunch machine, a card reader, or a printer became jammed (or even ran out of ink or paper), nothing could be done until the operators returned on Monday morning ... unless I happened to be there to fix it. As mathematics always came easily to me—and I did well in provincial competitions in mathematics, often one of the few females in the room—perhaps it was to be expected that when I enrolled at the University of Toronto at the age of 16, mathematics would be my major. Since I had a parallel interest in language and dialects, the other half of my double major became linguistics, and it was not until fourth year that I began to see that these two could be related in various ways. There were also courses in computer science, actuarial mathematics, economics, and various languages. Next came an MSc in Mathematics and Statistics also at the University of Toronto. This was probably the period of my life that was the most intensely mathematical despite the fact that my major research paper was in a topic in mathematical linguistics (supervised by a mathematician). I was also intrigued that not one of my mathematics or statistics professors was female, and in the entire cohort of my Masters year, perhaps as many as a hundred students, only three of us were female. My PhD,