News

CS Students and Staff Attend National SWE Conference

November 21, 2022

SWE students posing at conference
Society of Women Engineers members at last month’s national SWE conference. Back row, left to right: Audrey Yu, Fiorella Rivadeneira, Erin Nguyen, Emily Spence, and Niera Bakr. Front row, left to right: Madeline Smith, Hannah Rickert, Manuela Montes de Oca, and Yousra Awad. Not shown: Rebeca Zapiach, Maya Parada, and Leeza Nadeem.

In October, 12 members of UR’s Society of Women Engineers student chapter SWE’s national WE22 conference in Houston. CS students, Leeza Nadeema and Yousra Awad were amongst them. “It’s always incredibly empowering to be able to learn how to better ourselves as women in STEM through SWE Conferences,” says Hannah Rickert ’25 of biomedical engineering, a GEAR student and SWE conference coordinator. “With hundreds of workshop-style sessions about topics ranging from interviewing tips to being a minority in the workplace, we were able to pick and choose topics that related to what we wanted to improve upon. The conference also gave us the opportunity to network with not only larger companies that were seeking new hires, but also with women in STEM from across the country.”

Robin Clark, CS PhD Program Coordinator, and Aisling Sive, AS&E Graduate Admissions Counselor, represented UR AS&E at the SWE conference. Their goal was to reach potential graduate students and recruit them to attend UR programs, specifically CS. They also networked with companies and organizations to get the UR brand out to those who may not know about the UR programs.