I'll be traveling tomorrow. Now a lot of you are used to reading about exciting and exotic travel to locations like Brazil and Redmond but this is not that sort of travel. I will spend the first part of my day in Amherst Massachusetts and the University of Massachusetts. Now UMass is a wonderful school and there are some truly outstanding people there but it doesn’t fit my idea of an exotic place. From there I will travel to Columbia, Maryland, about a half hour from Baltimore. I am going there for a high school faculty event.
The thing about both of these trips is that while they are not exotic locals or unusual places, I really expect to enjoy myself over the next couple of days. What is important is the people. Friday is all about various Women in Engineering Programs and I will be with people who care deeply about the value of having more women in engineering of all kinds. This is an idea I feel strongly about.
On Saturday I will be with some people I have known and respected for a number of years. They will be providing helpful training for a group of high school teachers. This is another idea I feel strongly about. We need better trained teachers of computer science in high schools.
And believe it or not, in a way, these two trips are related. It is important to reach people, boys and girls, with the excitement that is engineering before they get to college. Better trained teachers who know and are excited about their subjects are key to making computer science and other engineering related disciplines exciting to students. Maybe if we do things right in high school more girls will become engineers in college.

I feel good about supporting these projects. As Alistair Frost said the other day, to a lot of us at Microsoft, the slogan “Your potential, our passion” really means something.