Lighting the path

When she was an MIT undergraduate studying electrical engineering, Jeannette Wing '78, SM '79, PhD '83 took a required computer science class and began thinking about changing her major. But before making the decision, she called her father, a professor of electrical engineering at Columbia University, to ask one big question: Is computer science just a fad? "I literally remember asking him that question," Wing said, drawing chuckles from an audience of MIT students and faculty. Wing's father assured her that computer science was here to stay. "So I switched," said Wing, who is herself now the Avanessians Director of the Data Science Institute and professor of computer science at Columbia. "And I've never looked back."