Four CCIS students attended a workshop series hosted by the Computing Research Association’s Committee on the Status of Women in Computing Research (CRA-W) in San Francisco earlier this month. The students, Nancy Yadav, Farnaz Irannejad Bisafar, Mehraneh Liaee and Swagatika Panda attended a number of presentations and lectures aimed at clarifying educational and career goals and introducing attendees to leading women in computer science.

“These conferences are great opportunities to learn, to network, and to get to know about the experiences that other senior students or corporate leaders or professors have seen in their careers,” says Yadav, a second-year master’s student currently on co-op at Intel Corporation in Hudson. Yadav presented a poster based on her work at Intel at the conference, and received encouraging feedback from students in her field.

CRA-W aims to increase the number of women in computer science and engineering, both in research and in academia. At the two-day conference, the focus was on sharing strategies for success by introducing students to each other and to women who have made their mark in the computing world. Yadav, a first-time attendee, and Bisafar, who was there for the second time, agreed that the workshops provided vital information on networking, presentation and communication skills, and both women suggested that those were among the most useful topics covered. The mentors who led these sessions included women from Microsoft, Intel and Yahoo Labs, as well as professors from Yale University, Duke University and University of California, San Diego.

“It’s kind of like a fresh start,” says Bisafar, a second-year Ph.D. candidate who recently had a paper she’d worked on for two years rejected. “While you’re doing your Ph.D., sometimes you have your ups and downs. It’s good to go and see other people, get inspired by them. You learn a lot.”

Both women had different motives for attending the workshop series: for Bisafar, it was an opportunity to recover from rejection, and for Yadav, it was a chance to weigh the pros and cons of pursuing academia or going corporate. For both women, the weekend offered an opportunity to share their experiences, learn from others and pick up some valuable people skills along the way.

Now, Bisafar has at least three years of work ahead of her, studying Human Computer Interaction and how to use technology to enhance parent-child communication. Yadav is leaning toward a corporate job if she finds one that fits her interest in researching security risks when she graduates at the end of 2015.

“It’s really inspiring,” Bisafar says. “People there encourage each other. It’s really good. I liked it a lot.”

– As seen in the April 2015 E-Newsletter –