 Live from Houston, Texas, it's The Cube, covering Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. Welcome back to The Cube's coverage of the Grace Hopper Conference in Houston, Texas. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. We are joined today with Suzy Armstrong, Qualcomm's Senior Vice President of Engineering. Thanks so much for joining us, Suzy. Thank you. So start by telling me a little bit about yourself. How did you get into engineering? I got into engineering. I was always good at math and science as a kid, and I took my first programming class in college. Didn't have programming in high school. And it was like a puzzle. And then later I learned that with a degree in computer science, I could probably make a living as well. So I went to Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, got a bachelor's in computer science. And did you have any supportive people along the way? I mean, so much about what we hear about women entering these fields because I'm sure you were sort of a lone soldier at that time, not many women in your computer science classes. It wasn't really common, although there was probably 25% of my computer science classes in the 80s were women, which is actually pretty interesting. And I had very supportive parents. And I had very supportive instructors and professors as well. At Qualcomm, you are famous for creating the first mobile internet code. So we have you to thank the fact that we can pull up these little gadgets in our pockets. My husband says, that's making zombies. Kind of true. So talk about your career at Qualcomm and what you've done. So Qualcomm in those days in the 90s was working on CDMA. Qualcomm created the first real mobile, commercially viable mobile voice system. And so at the time, I had some very supportive management. And they said, what if we use that voice link and we tried to send data over it? And so I created something called Simple Packet Data. And in 19 in three months, we got it running. And in 1997, at one of the big TTIA shows in March, we surfed the net on a little display about an inch square. And it really took off from there. Wow, wow. One of your passions is getting more women into this industry. Can you talk a little bit about some of the programs and initiatives that you have at Qualcomm? Yeah. We have a number of initiatives and programs. The one I am particularly passionate about is something called the Thinkabit Lab. And the Thinkabit Lab is a STEM exposure. Right now, we're working with underserved sixth grade, sixth, seventh, and eighth grade kids. And it's a way to connect STEM exposure to careers in engineering and technology for kids that may not ever get exposed to that. So give me an example of how that would work. So they come in for the one day class, they come in and they go through what we call the world of work. And we show them all the different kinds of jobs that we have at Qualcomm, including engineering and patent attorneys and accountants. And then they go from there. We do some strengths and values programs. And then they go from there into the lab and they learn how to program on Arduino board, make a servo move, and then they go over to our wall of sort of plush toys and tongue depressors and dinosaurs and glitter. And they create a little robot. And then they present it at the end of the day. And it's proven to be really impactful not only to those kids, but to their teachers, their administrators, their superintendents. We've expanded that program with partners in the San Diego area to seven different partners. And I think maybe we also expanded it with Virginia Tech in the DC area. So we're really excited about that. And I'm really excited about the work that the impact that that has on girls. We also run what we call Q-Camps, which are girls only, two-week camps in the summer. And we just finished our third year of a three-year cohort of girls, rising sixth graders, seventh graders, eighth graders. And we are working with Berkeley to do a longitudinal study on how that affects their career choices. So this is a long-term pipeline. If you're working with sixth graders, 12-year-olds right now, you're not going to be able to hire them for a good number of years. What about the women who are maybe pre-MBA or pre-engineering master's degrees? How are you making sure that they stay in engineering and stay in tech? Yeah, well, for one thing, Qualcomm's kind of used to the long timelines. We work out the technologies that we work on tend to, we start five years, 10 years ahead, like 5G. Yes, exactly. So we're kind of used to looking at sixth graders and thinking, oh, maybe you will be fueling the technology of the future. We also have two other programs in Qualcomm that are employee networks for women only. One for women development engineering and one that is in our IT group. And those have been very impactful for both the women that are in them and also the women and the men that are in the management area around them. We have some of those ladies here at the conference. So it's also formed some professional development. And that, you were recently honored as one of the top companies by the Anita Borg Institute. And that was one of the points that the Anita Borg Institute made is that companies have to be deliberate, have to be planful about how they are developing their female talent. You can't do an ad hoc program. It's got to be something formal. So can you talk about how that program, the nuts and bolts of it and what it is, what are the components? I don't think there's necessarily any single sort of recipe with the nuts and bolts. We, like all of these companies in the industry, we look at women as an economic imperative. We don't want to leave all this talent on the table. So we attack it from many different angles. The stem exposure for younger kids, the support of women and the hiring of women into technical jobs. And trying to make the rest of us understand what kinds of barriers these women face. So I wish I could give you a recipe of nuts and bolts recipe. I want a secret sauce. Yeah, I know. Right, right. And I think it's really important that Qualcomm's not the only, obviously Qualcomm's not the only one doing these kinds of this kind of work because 10, 15 years ago, there was nothing like the Grace Hopper Conference. There was no real consortium of companies who helped women with their careers and helped them make these choices. So I think the nuts and bolts, if you will, are not only at individual companies, they're also in the whole industry. Speaking of Grace Hopper, you're here, you've been to this conference many times before. What are your thoughts and impressions of this one? Oh my gosh, it's so inspirational to walk into a conference center and see, I came last year as well, 12,000 and then I think there's 15,000. Confident, talented women here. And plus, all these companies who are really interested in not only hiring them, but making sure that they end up being a part of this society that we are building. So it's incredibly inspirational. And then I, with the programs that they have here, very practical, very hands-on. This, the Anita Borg Institute and the Grace Hopper Conference has some of the most concrete programs that I've ever seen. We're just about out of time, but I want to know who is your STEM hero and why? Ah, that's a really tough one because I have a lot of STEM heroes and frankly, because probably the exposure I had, a lot of them are men. I have had so many men help me in my career and I've learned from so many men, not only my managers, but the people under me, the people around me. So it's really hard to point to one person that is my STEM hero. But I do have to point to my mother. Oh, so in the end, it is a woman. My mother, my mother. And was she an engineer? She was not an engineer, but my mother could fix anything. She was, and I think that really, in all seriousness, that really rubbed off on me. If she was faced with something that was broken, she would take it apart and she would, yeah, she was resourceful and she wasn't afraid of anything. Wow, wow. So thanks to your mom. Thanks, mom. Well, that concludes our time with Susie Armstrong, the Senior Vice President of Engineering at Qualcomm. Thank you for joining us. This has been theCUBE's live coverage of the Grace Hopper Conference here in Houston, Texas. We'll be back after this break.