The USF GradSWE group was founded in Fall 2019. The first event was a kickoff networking event to gauge what kind of content would be most interesting and helpful to our students. The next semester, COVID-19 hit and the events planned for the Spring 2020 semester were cancelled. In addition, all events in Fall 2020 were moved online. They were able to use online platforms to their advantage by engaging more professionals over a much wider region. For example, they had originally planned to have a single 4-person panel to introduce our community to show different post-PhD career paths. Moving the events online allowed them to grow the number of speakers and events to include to two panels, one for academia and another non-academia, with 5-6 women in each panel from a variety of engineering disciplines. Additionally, they have been able to record our workshop sessions to allow for members who are unable to participate in them in real time the opportunity to watch later.
Even though the community was established at the beginning of global pandemic, they have been able to engage our community through many different events. This year, the GradSWE chairs have been working hard planning events for this semester and next year. They are currently working on hosting a technical talk for each engineering department throughout the 2021-2022 year. This technical talk series would expose GradSWE to more graduate students and faculty to help expand member numbers.
Learn more about USF GradWE group:
Instagram handle: @usfswe