 Interestingly, when you study the data, people have been trying to encourage the participation of women and underrepresented minorities in scientific and engineering professions for two or three decades now. And when you look at what's been happening over that period of time, you see that you have a different issue, one thing you can't treat everyone the same. For women, what you now see is just as many girls graduate from high school with just as good a capabilities in science and math as boys do. So women have the fundamentals to choose a career in science and technology equal to that of men. So what you see is more women and young girls opting out, choosing other professions. And it's a very complex story as to why that is. It ranges from not really, a lot of women I think want to be part of helping professions and not realizing what a wonderful helping profession science and engineering is that you can actually design products to help the deaf communicate better, make people who are blind lives easier to improve how we all receive our products and services, improve people's lives in a variety of ways. I'm not sure that that connection is always made in school. I know it wasn't when I was in school. It was presented as sort of derived facts that you had to memorize. And I think latching on to that excitement and what a difference you can make if you're in those careers, I also think that there are subtle and cultural barriers of image and a lot of the television and movie and popular images of people who do science and technology, they're either the evil genius or they're the nerd in the lab coat. And I think that the profession needs to really think about how to present a very positive image of the differences that these people make in people's lives to address that issue. Now for underrepresented minorities, interestingly the main challenge is getting more of those students into the college eligible population. Because the data will show that once minority students graduate from high school and move on to college, just as many underrepresented minority students choose bachelor's degrees in science and engineering as white students do. So it's a really critically important issue that that population be broadened and better represented in the college pool. And in addition, I think all the same issues that I was talking about for women with image and recognizing, you know, how fun and exciting these careers are is also extremely important. But you've kind of got that extra barrier that some of those minority students may need extra help to be able to graduate from high school and have college as an option and have the ability to afford college. When I was working at the Commerce Department in the latter half of the 90s, it was a case study in the internet boom and what it did to needs in science and engineering professions. And in particular, business at that point in time considered that they had a shortage of highly qualified computer scientists and engineers. And whether or not labor economists would sit around and argue about whether or not there was really a shortage, but there was certainly a perceived shortage. CEOs of very large companies were coming into the Commerce Secretary and saying we cannot find enough workers to fill all these jobs and they're going begging. So there was a big national focus where we in the administration traveled around the country, we did town hall meetings, we pulled together a lot of ideas and best practices of what people were doing around the country that just seemed to work and looked at ways to maybe think about how you target people who might not otherwise be in these careers and that included mid-career people, such as for example people leaving the military who might have really strong skill sets that could be easily retrained mid-career. That included looking at ways that the disabled could participate and then looking at how you bring students through the pipeline and engage them and give them the information that they need to really want to participate in these careers. And GTAC was targeted really at middle school students and the information that we had at the time showed that as early as sixth grade many students were choosing to take themselves off of a path where they would be taking the most advanced math and science courses and then therefore would not be as well prepared for these careers by the time they got to college. So in GTAC we tried to do three things. One was we tried to engage them in a fun and exciting way so that this issue would kind of get onto the radar screen. Secondly we tried to provide really concrete career information. So we went around and we worked with the National Association of Manufacturers and looked at about fifty science and engineering careers including we tried to find things like sound technician for traveling bands, careers that you might not necessarily think of as a tech career and amazingly those folks have to have quite a bit of education at least some of them and make fifty or sixty thousand dollars a year. So for each career we highlighted we tried to include what educational credentials you had to have, how long you had to stay in school and how much money you could make after you got out. And then the third thing that we tried to do was figure out ways that you could hook those kids up with real scientific and engineering role models. And we included some of that on a website where we had case studies of people who were just wonderful like Stephanie Kualik from DuPont who invented Kevlar and we had this wonderful resource there at the Commerce Department because we managed on behalf of the President the National Medal of Technology. So we had all these wonderful innovators who had been recognized by the President. So we were able to look to those people as role models and as stories of what great careers you could have and then we tried to put some fun and excitement and games into the whole thing and also some serious career information. And it was delivered through a website and it was also delivered through public service announcements that tried to encourage people to go to the website. And it was a lot of fun and we felt like it had some impact and it's still around today although it has changed its shape since the year two thousand which is when I last launched the thing.