CSC News
Five Extraordinary Women Become SHE++ Mentors
Five NC State Computer Science students and alumnae have been selected as mentors/role models in SHE++, a Stanford University initiative whose goal is to foster a community to inspire a new generation of female programmers. The purpose of the program is to encourage girls to explore computer science, to demystify the computer science major to high school and middle school students and to bridge connections between young leaders, and inspire students. The group’s initiatives include building a tool to connect technically-inclined high school and middle school girls with upper level female college students and recent graduates in computer science via online video conversations two to three times a month.
NC State’s participants include:
Kamaria Hardy is an undergraduate student involved in the University Scholars program and the Pre-Collegiate Initiative Chairperson for the NC State Chapter of the National Society of Black Engineers. She is a teaching assistant for CSC 116, and next year will be Program Chair for the National Society of Black Engineers, and a 2013-2014 Engineering Ambassador.
Masters Degree student Pamela Ocampo is the current president of Women in Computer Science at NC State. She has also served as an Engineering Ambassador, and as a graduate student member and webmaster for the Society of Hispanic Engineers. She recently volunteered to help start a local chapter of “Girl Develop It” by serving as a teaching assistant for an introduction to HTML and CSS course designed for women in other fields that are interested in learning more about programming. After graduation she plans to begin work as an application developer at ThoughtWorks. She is going to the second annual SHE++ Conference at Stanford University later this month.
PhD student Piyali Dey has remained involved with different mentoring and teaching activities in the department for a long time, and has now become the part of “The League of Extraordinary Young Women” to continue her mentorship during this process. She is an officer in several student clubs including Women in Computer Science, the NC State chapter of ACM/AITP, and the Computer Science Graduate Student Association. She is also going to the SHE++ conference at Stanford University later this month.
Alumna Andrea Villanes earned her MS in Computer Science in 2012. While a student at NC State, she served as president of Women in Computer Science. She won a scholarship to attend the Grace Hopper Conference in 2010, and attended on her own in 2011 and 2012. She is currently an ambassador for the Anita Borg Institute, and is an active member of Latinas in Computing. She will be joining the Institute of Advanced Analytics as NC State as a research associate later this year. As part of her transition from school to the workforce, she is one of the founding members of the group Women in Technology, in Peru.
Alumna Bushra Anjum received her PhD in Computer Science from NC State in 2012. She is currently an assistant professor at the National University of Computer and Emerging Sciences in Lahore, Pakistan. While pursuing her PhD at NC State, Anjum attended numerous conferences and workshops (including the 2012 Google Graduate Researchers in Academia of Diverse Backgrounds (GRAD) CS Forum, the Career Mentoring Workshop (co-located with SIGSE 2012), and the IEEE N2Women Workshop (co-located with INFOCOM 2012), and the CRA-W Graduate Cohort Workshop) aimed at promoting computer science and particularly, women in computer science.For more information about SHE++ and to view the mentors’ profiles, click here.
~coates~
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