Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing 2004

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Women@IT: Graduate Education, The Next Big Thing

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The Fifth Grace Hopper Celebration: Making History, celebrating the impact of women - past, present, and future - on computing

For Grace Hopper 2004 in Chicago we focused on graduate education with a 3 part presentation. The next generation of CS/IT professionals, drawn from upcoming IT students, will shape the future of this field. Thus, it is critical to attract and promote students who will be future leaders and visionaries and bring diverse perspectives to the table. The theme of our proposed session is: increasing the pool of women students in graduate CS/IT programs and positioning them to become future university CS/IT faculty and leaders in the field.

Faculty and graduate students presented a program of strategies for recruitment, retention and community building at the graduate level. We focused in particular on the Graduate Outreach Roadshow, a potential model for other institutions, in the hope of encouraging discussion about the overall feasibility, effectiveness, and appropriateness of this and other strategies for involving women in CS/IT at the graduate level.

Speakers:
Lenore Blum - Faculty Advisor to Women@SCS - opened session, gave an overview of the Women@IT initiative
Carol Frieze - Director of Women@SCS - spoke about the history of the Roadshow and introduced the graduates who followed with their Roadshow presentation

Graduate Presenters:
Gita Sukthankar - PhD Robotics
Ariadna Font Llitjos - PhD Language Technologies
Tina Bennett - PhD Language Technologies
Jing Chen - PhD Computer Science
Ting Chih-Shih - Masters and Alumna, Software Engineering

For the final part of the program faculty members, Anastassia Ailamaki (Computer Science) and Bernardine Dias (Robotics), joined the other presenters to discuss the dynamics, issues and challenges involved in the Women@IT enterprise.

Other Graduates:
Bianca Schroeder - PhD Computer Science, presented in the PhD forum "Improving the performance of static and dynamic requests at a busy web server".
Katrina Ligett - PhD Computer Science, was on a panel "The Role of Mentoring in Recruiting and Retaining Female Undergraduate Students in Computer Science"
Priya Kothari - from Carnegie Mellon's Heinz School, also joined our group