Dr. Virginia Klein (Efros)

I attended CCNY because it was my local college and it was free. I enjoyed my time at CCNY very much. I made lifelong friends. Many of the friends I made were from my high school. CCNY gave me the tools that I needed. My interest was to know how things work. I went into engineering to understand how things worked and why. I had many summer positions that were related to engineering. For one summer, I worked for the New York City Department of Transportation. After graduating, I worked for AT&T. I worked in engineering for 41 years. I worked in a number of different fields. My husband also pursued advanced education. Whenever my husband needed to be somewhere else, I had to change my area of engineering. I started in telecommunications. When he decided to go to medical school, I got into nuclear power because that was the company hiring in the locality of his medical school. While pursuing my doctoral degree at night, since I worked full-time during the day, I needed to write a thesis that did not involve nuclear power. I shifted my attention to biomedical issues, and looked into ways to assist the hospital. While there, I worked on engineering support for the first ICU bed. After completing the doctoral degree, I went into biomedical engineering. My husband was now a resident at the University of Pennsylvania. I joined him as a researcher on the staff in the Department of Anesthesiology and Critical Care with a joint appointment at the Moore School of Engineering. When he got his first job in medicine as an MD in Iowa, I worked at the University of Iowa hospital. I put in the first machine-read EKG system in a large hospital. While in Iowa, my children needed day-care, so I started and directed the first before- and after-school day-care program for elementary school children in the state of Iowa. When we finally came back east, I started working for Bell Laboratories, so I was back in telecommunications.