Women in Engineering
Tiger Mom earns her stripes Aimee Kalnoskas • Contributing Editor
Amy Wang: world-class technologist with a B.E. from Tsinghua University, an M.S. and Ph.D. from Columbia, and Co-Founder and V.P. of Cogniac, a computer vision A.I. services provider, says she was “tricked” into engineering. This self-described Tiger Mom (to everyone except her 7-year-old daughter, although she disagrees) is known for asking a lot of questions. Appropriately, her Chinese name is Wang Hua Yan – making her initials WHY. So, this was our opportunity to turn the tables on Amy in this interview and ask not only “why”, but what, how, and when. We started by asking how she got into engineering, and that’s where the “trickery” came in. Not the right thing but for the wrong reason “As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a mathematician,” she said. “I wanted to invent some fundamental mathematic theories that help humans to understand the world better. And when the time came to go to college, my parents knew it would be hard to find a job if you were studying math. So, they tricked me into applying for the top university, Tsinghua University in China, for engineering. It’s like MIT in China. And so, I ended up in the engineering school.” Upset and disappointed, Amy decided she would become a mathematician anyway and proceeded to take a lot of math classes. Gradually, she realized she wasn’t very good at math or, at least, quite a few people in her classes were much better than her at the subject. Amy continued, “So I sort of gave up and got my degree in engineering. After college, I came to the states, got my Ph.D. at Columbia in computer
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