Reflecting back to my senior year of high school, I was definitely concerned about being a female going into the male dominated field of engineering. Since I went to an all girls high school, I was also worried about losing the female community that I had grown accustomed to having. However, I’ve been able to form great friendships and find supportive female groups.
USC has a lot of women-focused organizations both in and out of Viterbi. I’ve had some amazing opportunities to have leadership positions for these clubs including Society of Women Engineers and Viterbi’s Women In Engineering organization (WIE). I joined the WIE board last Fall as a Director of Marketing and will be continuing this year as Vice Chair! As Director of Marketing, I created, updated, and maintained multiple social media and communication pages with women in Viterbi. I also helped to develop a variety of professional, social, and networking events for women in Viterbi.
This semester, we decided that our goal as an organization in WIE is to be a resource for women in Viterbi and we felt that having a lot of small events, like we did in the fall of last year, wasn’t as effective as we desired. Last spring semester, we decided to shift and decrease the total amount of events in order to create bigger, more meaningful events. Our main event in the spring was our Leadership Conference.
This was WIE’s first time organizing a Leadership Conference and also doing it completely over Zoom! With 12 different events, including our keynote speaker President Folt, we really wanted a day focused on “finding the leader within”. This was a great opportunity for me to not only have the experience of organizing such a large event, but also to attend the different conference sessions! I learned a lot about Viterbi’s resources along with skills for leadership in the professional world. As I’m continuing as Vice Chair for WIE this year, I’m already excited to start coordinating and organizing our next conference.
