Women in CS a Big Success!

Although it's been a couple of weeks since the event was held, I wanted to update you all on how successful the women's evening I organized ended up being! If you happen to be a female in a computer program at your school, you might be able to get funding from your department to hold a similar event. Trust me, when the girls stay until 8pm on a Friday evening and are excited for the next meet up, it's worth the effort!

Our get together featured a Carleton computer science alumnus named Melissa. She graciously agreed to spend her Friday evening telling the current collection of female students about her experiences both at Carleton and at her new job as a software team lead. The audience was relieved to hear that being one of the few women in the field was not really so bad. In fact, other than the occasional effort on the part of the males to speak a bit less brusque around her, she found it to be perfectly ok to be different!

One really good piece of advice from Melissa was about finding some time to be girly. You won't necessarily have much opportunity to do that nine to five, so trying out some other activities where you either simply get to interact with other women or actually do girly things is important. For example, Melissa sells Mary Kay products because of the meetings with other women who do the same. You might enjoy book clubs, photography groups, and so on.

Of course, this event was made possible thanks to the Google Ambassador Program! Google supplied the pizza and, as an added bonus for this specific event, some neat giveaway swag as well!

Each participant received a Google umbrella and sticky notes with the Google Women logo. In addition, a few lucky winners were drawn for a really nice mug!



A huge thanks to Carleton's School of Computer Science, Google, Melissa, and everyone who attended this event, and hope to see you next time!