"I eventually moved home in Cambridge," she said. "But I would not recommend it. I wouldn't do it again because I think it was easy to lose a lot of the bonding aspects of living on campus."

After her graduation, Armstrong attended Harvard Law School as a member of the first class to include females.

"I kind of backed into it," she says. "There were no lawyers in the family and I thought we might need to have one," she says. "The law school took a long time to recognize they were ignoring 50 percent of the human race."

After law school, she began her career with the U.S. Department of Justice working with corporations to implement progressive employee compensation and benefit programs.

Today she serves as a consultant to boards of directors on corporate governance, executive compensation and board organizations with the firm of Moyer & Ross in New York City.

Along the way, Armstrong also became committed to Harvard.

Armstrong has a long list of offices she has held at Harvard, most prominently, her position as the president of the Board of Overseers for 1998 to 1999. Her law expertise was invaluable to the Board, to which fellow graduates elected her in 1993 to serve a six-year stint.

Armstrong shrugs off her commitment to an overwhelming number of organizations and boards of the University

"Isn't it Woody Allen who said that 90 percent of life is just showing up?" More seriously, she continues, "I enjoyed renewing the contact with Harvard. I have had a long history of being interested in Harvard and one thing led to another."

Much has changed since her undergraduate years in the late 1940's, and she sees her involvement with the evolution of the University as "an energizing experience."

She mentions that it is a challenge "to maintain the change," and she is devoted to Harvard's "mission of education."

Armstrong, with her contemporary involvement with Harvard, has a unique perspective of the changes in the University over the years.

"I think that Harvard is a far more welcome andopening environment now," she says. "There seemsto be a lot more integration than in my era and itseems a friendlier place. It was much moresink-or-swim in our day and now it is moreobviously caring."

In addition to her work on the Board ofOverseers, she has worked with standing committeesdealing with Humanities and Arts and she is amember of the Harvard-Radcliffe Committee toExamine and Review the Role and Status of WomenUndergraduates.

She is most interested in a group that she haschaired for the last two years examining the roleof women Faculty and the tenure track.

"All of us would like to see more women on theFaculty especially on the under-graduate level,"she says. "The numbers in the graduate schools arebetter."