About Us
We're a developing chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery's Committee on Women - a national
organization that seeks to promote, celebrate, and support women in computer science and
engineering. Although we've been slow to start, we're making a big effort to get our name out there
and reach women in computing at UVa on several different fronts.
Workshops
Many women in male-dominated fields feel that they suffer an experience gap in comparison to
their male peers - even when this isn't actually true! So for the benefit of all students in
computing at UVa we plan to regularly organize workshops on practical topics like building a website,
Unix basics, and Python. We anticipate that these workshops will benefit not only the participants but
also the teachers, who can range from undergraduate students to graduate students to actual faculty,
as they will come away with an improved understanding of useful material themselves.
Social Events
Computing isn't known for its social aspects, but that doesn't have to be true! Even the most
experienced programmer can benefit from the shared experience and ideas that come from getting
to know your fellow students in the department. Plus, it can be a great way to have fun trying
things you might not normally do - like Four-Square or cooking chili!
Networking Events
A key part of our mission is to make students in computing aware of the many opportunities to further
their learning and careers at UVa. Alongside faculty and the UVa ACM, we plan to continue
to support and organize events bringing undergraduate students and faculty together, help students
choose a thesis advisor, and make students aware of undergraduate research opportunities.
Career Events
We hope to organize industry information sessions and recruit woman speakers from industry to
come to UVa and share their experiences. For those more interested in graduate school or an
academic career, we plan to seek out women from the academic community and organize sessions
on choosing and getting into graduate school and a research career.
HistoryPast Events
In February 2008 we decide to celebrate women in computing by individually delivering
roses to female faculty in CS and ECE for Valentine's Day. The responses were very positive
and we plan to do it again next year.
We also co-organized two student/professor lunches with ACM to a positive turnout. Students
were given the opportunity to talk to several professors casually over bread, cold cuts, and
chips.
Other past events include submitting an entry to the department Chili Cookoff together, a roundtable dinner, and a few speakers and panels on women in computer science. However, the participation in most of our events is far from ideal, so we are always actively looking for new ideas for events. OrganizationWe were founded in 2004, and our bylaws can be found in .doc format - click here to download. We are currently an official UVa student organization, and our faculty advisor is Dr. Anita Jones. |
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