Bringing together academia and industry
In March 2019, the 35th Electrical and Computer Engineering Department Heads Association (ECEDHA) Annual Conference and ECExpo was held in Tucson, Arizona, bringing together electrical and computer engineering (ECE) academia and industry professionals for four days of programming and networking. According to its website, this year’s meeting offered department chairs and faculty a chance to discuss the most pressing issues facing ECE today, provided the Technology Innovation Track as a specialized program for lab professionals (including access to the ECE Robotics Demo Lab), joined together ECE communications to share best practices in educating the public and prospective students about the field of ECE, and catered to graduate students via targeted workshops that focused on future career paths.
One such workshop, Improving the Diversity of Faculty in Electrical and Computer Engineering (iREDEFINE), was created for graduate women and underrepresented minority students, specifically those who are up to two years away from completion of their Ph.D. degrees and plan to pursue faculty positions in the United States. The iREDEFINE project is supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF). Presented in this article are the experiences of two graduate students who attended the conference as well as program facilitator Dr. Jenna Carpenter.
Read more about it on IEEE Xplore Digital Library.
ALSO: Pipelining – Attractive Programs for Women: Girls in Engineering and Technology Day
When Dr. Babak D. Beheshti, dean of the College of Engineering and Computer Sciences at New York Institute of Technology (NYIT), welcomed more than 100 female students from local high schools to NYIT’s inaugural Girls in Engineering and Technology Day on 4 May 2019, his letter in the program brochure referenced the lack of women in engineering right in its first paragraph. “While the number of women in medicine, law and business continues to grow, nationally and globally, women’s participation in STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) continue to lag significantly behind. In spite of the fact that engineering and technology related fields demand some of highest starting salaries among college graduates, girls still are not pursuing careers in these fields,” read his opening message.
That lag in participation was the impetus for launching Girls in Engineering and Technology Day. “The numbers are far lower than anything that would be considered acceptable,” shares Beheshti. “We have been having this discussion at NYIT as to how we could initiate some activities and projects to broaden the participation of women in STEM, particularly engineering, technology, and computer science, so the idea of an all-day event for high school-aged young women became a natural choice for us.
Read more about it on IEEE Xplore Digital Library.
