"Being a nerd seems to be a lot cooler than it used to be," says Pamela Chuang, who is fully qualified (who in the College of Engineering isn't?) but who doesn't look or act the part.

Chuang has spent most of her undergraduate career in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering on projects involving the design and behavior of microprocessor circuits down to the "gate level," how bits flow across a circuit. She describes the work as "sort of in a space between computer science and electrical engineering."

Outside of class she played flute in the Cornell Wind Ensemble and Symphonic Band, with a little piano on the side; but on her iPod, she says, are "all kinds of music." She has the distinction of being a member of the all-female team that created the computer game "Green, Eggs, and Pan," which took first place in the national Games4Girls contest, which had all-female teams competing to create games aimed at middle school and high school girls. Ordinarily, game-building teams recruit music students to provide background music, while engineers and computer scientists do the programming; turning the system around, Chuang supplied the music.

Chuang grew up in Syracuse, N.Y. Her brother is currently a sophomore at Cornell, and she hopes her sister, still in high school, will decide to come here.

Chuang chose Cornell mostly for its programs, faculty and the beauty of the campus, but also because it is close to her family in Glastonbury, Conn. She entered a co-op program and has spent two full semesters working for chip-maker AMD, debugging chip-testing circuit boards. She chose the co-op approach in preference to summer interning because "I wanted to stay with a company longer. Projects take a long time."

During the last year Chuang served as president of the Cornell student chapter of the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineering), overseeing a turnaround that won the group the Cornell Engineering Alumni Association award for "most improved campus group."

After graduation she has opted to take a job with Broadcom in Boston (still close to the family), again to do "gate level" work in a company that, she says, makes chips that are used inside a lot of common devices.