Front and Center

News from the Director

Others might find summer the lazy, hazy days but we at the Center for Women in Engineering have been anything but lazy! As promised we are working toward a well-crafted fall with mentoring programs, face to face meetings, training sessions,webinars and informational fliers for our all of students, faculty, staff and alumni.

Keep reading to hear about all of the new and exciting things WiE has planned for the fall semester.

With best wishes for a safe, healthy and Fall!

Dr. Shelly Heller
WiE Center Director

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WiE is 3! A Conversation with Harvey Mudd College President, Dr. Maria Klawe-April 6th 5-7pm

WiE Student Advisory Board

To support our efforts to engage with current SEAS students, WiE will now have a student advisory board made up of undergraduate and graduate students. Their mission is to help brainstorm events and activities that will support SEAS students. We will be relying on them to help us pinpoint the issues students want to know more about and help us get out the word to all students about the Center’s programming.

The application will be posted on the center's website and we will begin accepting applications soon.

WiE Fall 2022 Programs

We had three student-centered and one-faculty centered programs to be presented toward the end of August and beginning of September. On August 26th, WiE joined our new first year class to provide background on how words and action don’t always match to insure both diversity and inclusion.

Following, on August 27 we participated in the SEASPAN and Undergraduate Learning Assistants training. Our particular focus is supporting and maintaining diversity and inclusion on team projects and team activities. As inclusive teams are key to both academic and professional success, we shared these materials with our faculty and posted these materials on our website. Of course if you or your company would like to use these materials, we would be happy to share or adapt them for your setting.

Up next is our traditional graduate student welcome which we are happy to co-sponsor with our SEAS Office of Graduate Study. We will host a Welcome Tea on Wednesday, September 14th for all new graduate students ( and new faculty) as we introduce them to SEAS department chairs. I look forward to leading a lively question and answer session, so if there is something you’ve always wanted to know or something that every incoming student should know, send that on to me and I’ll ask it for you.

Our 3rd anniversary keynote speaker, Dr. Maria Klawe, described her imposter syndrome experiences and we thought, “yup, that sounds like me as well”.; If you are a SEAS alum we’ve got the Imposter Syndrome 411: who’s got it, what is it, where does one feel it, when does it appear, why do we have it. Mark October 13th on your calendar to join us an in-person and online program focusing on the imposter syndrome. We plan, too, to extend this program in later months to present this program to our staff, grad students and faculty.

Speaking of faculty, grant writing is a major part of establishing and maintaining a research program and part of grant writing (especially to NSF and NIH) is to discuss how to address the questions on how the project being described can broaden the participation to include traditionally underrepresented groups in this field. The Center has prepared guidelines to help faculty brainstorm how to present theirr part of their proposal and, of course, we are there to write letters of support. The document was sent to the department chairs and each faculty member. It is also posted on our website.

What WiE Are Reading

The Chronicle or Higher Education (July 18), reports “colleges in recent years have boasted that they are steadfastly committed to student and faculty racial diversity,” but “a new analysis by McKinsey & Company says that’s really more talk than action.” Higher education “like the United States, has challenges when it comes to its history.” In fact, “at the current rate, it would take colleges another 70 years to recruit enough Asian, Black, Latina/o, and Native American student for their enrollment to somewhat reflect America’s demographics. That figure “would be dominated by and Latina/o students.” For Native American and Black students, “it would take more than 300 years to form a representative student body.” Colleges “collect flawed an incomplete racial enrollment data, struggle to reflect on their own racist history, and fail to invest adequate time and resources into
diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts, according to the reports.

Inside Higher Ed (7/19) reports on the latest Student Voice survey “conducted in mid-June by Inside Higher Ed and College Pulse with support from Kaplan” of 1,073 first-generation undergraduates “from 94 colleges and universities. The survey reveals” that eight in 10 feel
“like they belong on campus, yet one-third of students only have sense of belonging in certain spaces.” Fifty-five percent “have at leas a few friends whose parents did not graduate with a four-year degree, either; an additional one-quarter aren’t sure of their friends’ first-generation status.” Three-quarters of first-generation students “reveal that characteristic to professors and classmates only sometimes.” The top two factors “contributing to initial interest in their college were affordable tuition (49 percent) and generous financial aid (3 percent).” One quarter of students are “at colleges with first generation orientation programs; about the same percentage of respondents’ colleges hold events for these students to meet one another.”

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