WiE Newsletter - May 2022 - ISSUE 30
Dr. Shelly Heller
Dr. Shelly Heller

Front and Center 

News from the Director


It’s May. For those of us on the grading side of finals it is a very busy time. Preparing exams, compiling grades, basking in our students’ accomplishments, hooding PhDs, shaping seniors hands, meeting their parents! For students it is all those things and stress as well, a bit of cramming, a bit of pride in their accomplishments, and looks ahead to summer adventures as interns, research assistants, jobs to make extra dollars for fall or just vegetating for a while.

The center, too, is looking forward to the summer as we plan for the fall. Here is where we need your input about our plans, and/or additional ideas (contact us at scwie@gwu.edu). The list is not in a specific order or importance

New Programming

1) We will prepare and present a series of workshops for our incoming freshman class and for our SEASpan and Learning Assistants (LAs) and GTA (Graduate Teaching Assistants) concerning the presence of unconscious bias, its impact on teamwork, and how to resolve this for your teams so that you are all able to do the best you can.

2) We will prepare and present a workshop for our undergraduate seniors, our graduating graduate students and for our alumni on the concept of Imposter Syndrome and how one might address it.

3) Broadening participation in engineering is a major goal of the Center and statements or plans are necessary for many funding applications. We will prepare and help the departments design and institutionalize broadening participation plans that might include outreach to local high schools, working with faculty at community colleges, providing other support for the pipeline of potential engineers.

4) WiE believes that having allies of all different identities will enhance collaboration in the classroom and the work place. To that end, we plan to broaden our outreach and work on a series of programs around allyship. 

Continued Programming

5)  Our student faculty interviews. Is there a faculty member you want to us to profile - let us know!

6) Our Meet Our Faculty webinar. Is there a faculty member whose research and interaction with research students you would like to hear from - let us know!

7) Review and upgrade our mentoring program.

Changes to our support structure

8) In addition to our dedicated board of advisors, both internal and external, we will be forming a student advisory board made up of current undergraduate and graduate students for the specific purpose of working on joint programming. 

9) As many of you know, WiE provides financial support to send students to professional conferences. As we want our students to be prepared and make the most of their conference experience, WiE will be collaborating with the SEAS Center for Career Services on some pre-conference workshops about networking, "elevator pitch", and other relevant topics.


We will be busy - so we expect fewer newsletters this summer. - Less reading for you and more time for us.

With best wishes for a safe, healthy and inspiring Spring and Summer!
Dr. Shelly Heller
WiE Center Director

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What WiE Are Reading


Report: Black Women Uniquely Burdened By Student Debt

The Hechinger Report  (4/15) reports “nearly two-thirds of the $1.7 trillion in student debt in America is held by women, and Black borrowers are more negatively affected due to systemic racism, according to” a report Brittani Williams, a doctoral student in education leadership policy at Texas Tech University, coauthored. Her work is “an extension of research started by Education Trust in 2020 with a National Black Student Loan Debt Study survey of 1,300 Black borrowers and the subsequent Jim Crow Debt report, which identified college debt as a racial and economic justice issue.” Williams “and her coauthor, Victoria Jackson, Education Trust’s assistant director of higher education policy, said that Black women are marginalized due to their race and gender, putting them among the lowest earners in the labor market.” The racial wealth gap “leaves Black women with fewer resources to pay back their loans because, Williams said, for Black women, more degrees do not necessarily equal more money.”

Have you heard the saying “There are no girls on the internet”? Well, if you have you know it just isnt true, so why how did it start and why does it persist?  It might have begun in the male-prevalent early days of Usenet, particularly in the virtual Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs), a genre of text-based online role-playing games and predecessor to MMORPG like World of Warcraft. Know your memes (link: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/there-are-no-girls-on-the-internet) notes “During this era, it became a routine practice among male players to falsely pose as girls to solicit gifts or other unfair advantages. Such prevalence of gender swapped deception in MUDs was first noted in 1993 by American sociologist Amy Bruckman in her research paper "Gender Swapping on the Internet”:” The article is worth your time and provides a bit of a walk down memory lane.


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