{"id":21,"date":"2016-10-03T11:19:59","date_gmt":"2016-10-03T18:19:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/magazine.hmc.edu\/summer-2016\/?p=21"},"modified":"2017-01-13T15:39:41","modified_gmt":"2017-01-13T23:39:41","slug":"talking-tech","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/magazine.hmc.edu\/summer-2016\/talking-tech\/","title":{"rendered":"Talking Tech"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cWe were going to \u00a0do just six,\u201d says Elecia<\/strong> White \u201996 with an amusement only hindsight can afford.<\/p>\n

She\u2019s referring to the number of intended episodes of Embedded.fm, a weekly, 60-minute podcast created and hosted by Elecia and her husband, Christopher White \u201996. Now, a whopping 170 episodes later, the pair is busy as ever talking to makers, entrepreneurs and scientists of all stripes about the \u201chow, why and what of engineering,\u201d with particular devotion to devices. Guests have included YouTube sensation Simone Giertz (the self-proclaimed \u201cQueen of Shitty Robots\u201d), tech entrepreneur and author Dan Shapiro \u201997 and \u201cAll Things Considered\u201d host Kelly McEvers.<\/p>\n

For her part, Elecia is amazed by how far the show has come from its meager six-episode goal. With between 6,000 and 8,000 downloads per show and roughly 20,000 RSS subscribers, the show and its accompanying blog have afforded the hosts a modicum of internet fame and, with it, a steady stream of guests. In the beginning, they relied primarily on industry and alumni connections to find guests. Elecia says, the show is \u201cbig enough now where people will come to us,\u201d though she also searches for authors, speakers and entrepreneurs whose brains she wants to pick.<\/p>\n

\"Elicia<\/a><\/figure>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve had slow and steady growth, so a lot of it is just about continuing to do what we do, to revisit topics that change or that people want more information about and to stay relatively current with new stuff,\u201d says Elecia. This isn\u2019t terribly difficult: Her day job as a consultant keeps her steeped in the latest industry happenings. Co-owned and -run with Christopher, the consulting firm Logical Elegance specializes in firmware for resource-constrained embedded systems, helping clients take ideas through creation, implementation and manufacturing, resulting in embedded systems technology that values both design beauty and social implication.<\/p>\n

\u201cI am a big believer in understanding how your engineering affects the world,\u201d says Elecia. It\u2019s a sentiment hardwired into her even before attending Harvey Mudd, and one she has carried forward to this day. Logical Elegance\u2019s diverse client list includes socially conscious endeavors like educational toys, medical devices and gunshot location systems. And, working in embedded systems keeps her in her preferred element between engineering and computer science. At Mudd, Elecia designed an individual program of studies that married computer science with systems and theoretical engineering.<\/p>\n

\u201cI took all of the applied CS courses,\u201d says Elecia, \u201canything where I had to actually touch a computer and program. I also took every systems engineering course. This set me up to do signal processing and control software. Between children\u2019s toys and education systems and inertia sensors and DNA scanners\u2014all of these things I\u2019ve gotten to work on. I could not have designed a better major.\u201d<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t want to talk to other women about being a woman in tech. I want to talk to them about technology. I believe in being the change you want to see.<\/p>\n

\u2013 Elecia White ’96<\/cite><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In fact, she entered Harvey Mudd with the intent of studying pure engineering, but her experience in the school\u2019s fledgling CS department changed that. \u201cCS is natural to me, yet I never gave up the love of engineering, and that\u2019s how I ended up split between them,\u201d she says. Listening to the wide range of topics discussed on Embedded.fm, the dual nature of Elecia\u2019s passion becomes all the more evident.<\/p>\n

While Elecia calls herself a proponent of expanding opportunities for women in STEM, it\u2019s the being, rather than the talking, that appeals to her. And this is where the podcast, which typically avoids delving too deeply into social justice topics, nevertheless serves her purpose. \u201cI don\u2019t want to talk about being a woman in tech. I want to be a woman in tech. I don\u2019t want to talk to other women about being a woman in tech. I want to talk to them about technology,\u201d she says. \u201cI believe in being the change you want to see. I don\u2019t really want to talk much about diversity on the show. I just want it to be diverse.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cWe were going to \u00a0do just six,\u201d says Elecia White \u201996 with an amusement only hindsight can afford. She\u2019s referring […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":89,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-features"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/magazine.hmc.edu\/summer-2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/magazine.hmc.edu\/summer-2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/magazine.hmc.edu\/summer-2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/magazine.hmc.edu\/summer-2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/magazine.hmc.edu\/summer-2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/magazine.hmc.edu\/summer-2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/magazine.hmc.edu\/summer-2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/89"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/magazine.hmc.edu\/summer-2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/magazine.hmc.edu\/summer-2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/magazine.hmc.edu\/summer-2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}