UA Women In Computing Informational Meeting Notes
Good afternoon!
Thank you to all of those who attended Monday’s meeting, and thank you to those who have shown interest in joining this group! For those who couldn’t come, I wanted to share some information with you about what we discussed.
- We have applied to become an official organization with UA.
- We are officially members of an Academic Alliance member with NCWIT (National Center for Women in Information Technology). http://ncwit.org. Check out their site. They offer benefits for women in computing. Dr. Monica Anderson is our faculty advisor for this membership.
- Check out ACM-W http://women.acm.org/ (we are not yet members, but I don’t know that the university has to be a member for you to receive benefits) and CRA-W http://cra-w.org/, also. They provide mentoring workshops and travel funding.
- If you think you’d like to attend a fun conference, look into Grace Hopper (http://gracehopper.org/) and SEWIC (http://www.southeastwomenincomputing.org/ – next one is in 2015). There are scholarships available for these conferences so you could possibly attend for free.
- As a group on campus, we would like to meet once monthly, but we will offer two meeting dates to attempt to make the times convenient for more people.
- There will be annual dues of $10 to help pay for the cost of food at meetings and shirts.
- Dr. Susan Vrbsky is our faculty advisor. I’m the president for the remainder of this year, Elizabeth Williams, another PhD student, is VP for the remainder of this year, and Jenna Lisicky is Treasurer for the remainder of the year. We will vote on new officers during the second meeting of the academic year.
- Most importantly, the mission of the group is to foster a stronger community of females in CS. We hope to increase retention at UA as well as improve recruiting opportunities. We want to also provide mentor opportunities for high school girls interested in CS.
- We will seek speakers currently working in the field to deliver talks to our group throughout the year. If you know anyone, please feel free to help us make the connection!
With this semester coming to an end, I would recommend that the next meeting be scheduled in August, perhaps, the second week of school. If you have a different recommendation, please let me know! Once the university has approved our group, I will send out a link to our website. If you happen to really love building websites, and you would like to improve our website, let me know, and it shall be yours ;-)
If you have any questions, comments, suggestions, feel free to let me know. If you no longer want to be included on these emails, please send me an email, and I will remove you from my distribution list.
Thanks and good luck on all of your final projects and exams!