Spring/Summer Newsletter 2022
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Director's Update
A letter from Dr. Carolyn Seaman
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Greetings to our CWIT Family!
I’m happy to report that CWIT is doing well! Our students continue to provide inspiration on a daily basis, which makes everything we do easier and more fun. CWIT continues to ride the waves of change as we emerge from the pandemic reality and look for the new normal. We held most of our events and programs in person in the spring semester and plan to do the same this fall. In particular, we were able to hold our New Scholars Retreat in person this summer for the first time since 2019!
We have had some transitions among the CWIT staff that you should know about; Jenny Bowers has joined CWIT as our new Administrative Assistant. Jenny has a background in K-12 special education, and is a USM alum, with both bachelor's and master's degrees from Maryland institutions, and even a few summer classes at UMBC some years ago. She is returning to the workforce after years as a caregiver, and we're excited that she's chosen CWIT as her reentry point!
On a much sadder note, Dr. Danyelle Tauryce Ireland has resigned as CWIT’s Associate Director to take on a leadership role with Philadelphia Public Schools. Danyelle’s tenure as Associate Director made a lasting impact on CWIT, including raising the bar on the amount and quality of research we do, thus elevating our status as a national player in promoting diversity in higher ed. Danyelle also professionalized many aspects of our operations, and cared for our T-SITE scholars. She will be sorely missed, but we wish her well in her new venture, and congratulate Philadelphia on their new resident! We are currently interviewing candidates to be our new Associate Director, so stay tuned for news about a new member of our team.
CWIT has been a joyful place this past semester, as we’ve been able to greet our students in person more frequently, and the buzz of activity is slowly returning to our office suite and our meeting spaces. While we continue to be cautious and follow all the guidelines, we are enjoying the nearness of our students and other members of the community. We hope this trend will continue as we prepare for the return of our new and continuing students in just a matter of days! We are so grateful for your support, and hope that you are finding success in your work towards making the tech world more diverse, equitable, and inclusive.
With gratitude,
Carolyn Seaman
CWIT Director
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Our assessment efforts in the upcoming year will include our usual examination of event, program, and student outcomes (including retention and graduation), with additional insights into post-graduation outcomes such as full-time employment, employer sectors, and graduate school enrollment. We will also be revisiting our strategic plan this year, which will likely both depend on and update our assessment strategy.
We’ve recently been awarded two new NSF grants to fund our continued work and research. The first is to provide funding to support future cohorts of our T-SITE scholar program. The new grant, dubbed T-SITE3, opens our T-SITE program to engineering students and provides added support for our Allies in CWIT program. The second new grant, in collaboration with the Information Systems (IS) Department, is to establish and evaluate the PeerSIST program, which is an extension of the CWIT peer mentoring program to encompass transfer students in IS. It also includes a learning analytics component to help mentors and mentees discuss classroom engagement.
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The CWIT Student Council is an executive board of student officers elected by the CWIT community each year. The Council members are leaders in our community, and are charged with providing mechanisms and events that promote community building and fun. Spring 2022 events sponsored by the Council included:
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CWIT Shorts - a series of videos showcasing campus life and community
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The Bottled Up Initiative - a time capsule activity allowing students to reflect upon their past journey in letters to their future selves.
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Virtual cafes - space within the CWIT Discord for students to come interact and destress from the week
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T-shirt workshop - participants tie-dyed their own t-shirts
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2022 CWIT Student Council Social Media Co-Chair Toni O serving students at the SWE and CWIT SC Hot Chocolate & Cookie Bar in February.
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Community Awards & Graduation Recognition Ceremony
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Cindy Greenwood & Dr. Anupam Joshi with Cyber Scholar Graduates
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The CWIT Community Awards allow us at CWIT to recognize and thank those who have helped us work towards our mission of empowering students to enter the tech workforce and be change agents in making tech workplaces more diverse and equitable.
We celebrated this year’s awardees, along with our graduating seniors, at a ceremony on May 5, 2022, on campus. Click here to view a recording of the ceremony.
This event was a time to celebrate exemplary members of our community, and to recognize their contributions and the ways they inspire others to contribute to the CWIT mission.
Click here for more info and photos about this and other items from this newsletter.
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Student Personal Excellence Award Recipient and CWIT Scholar Graduate Courtney Cavin with her parents at the post-ceremonial dinner in the Engineering Atrium.
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A Reflection by Shaniah Reece
I had so much fun at the Center for Women in Technology (CWIT's) Winter Retreat this past Saturday! Besides discovering the hidden genius of my Big-WIT Mei-Lian Vader (the brains behind this 6ft+ paper and plastic cup tower), there was soooo much to unpack!
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Just when I thought I knew everything there was to know about the constantly addressed microaggressions, I learned something new. (N.B. the enemy of learning is knowing)!
During our session on Microaggressions co-presented by the CWIT Team, we were going through examples of microaggressions one may encounter. One example went something like: Everyone asks the one X student in the class for help with their Math Homework.
Huh? I always considered this to be a huge compliment since I thought it just showed the inherent respect and reverence others have for the intelligence and discipline of persons from this culture. What I learnt that day however is you can be placing enormous pressure on a person to represent and live-up to the expectations or stereotypes of their culture! This was a big blow.
In a nutshell this message can be unintentionally delivered us: "You are belong to group X therefore you must have these characteristics and qualities and if you do not you are failing your people!"
My biggest takeaway is there are so many innocent ways we can unintentionally harm someone but our INTENT however pure does not erase the IMPACT it has had. This was definitely a HUGE learning experience and humbling to realize I didn't know as much as I THOUGHT I knew.
#CWIT #UMBC #umbcproud #engineering #microagressions
Click here for more info and photos about this and other items from this newsletter.
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Our Cyber Leads, Brianna Turgott and Coby Ziv, provided two cyber workshops during the spring semester. In February, they led one as part of the BLAST Off event for high school freshman and sophomore girls as an intro to cybersecurity. In April, the Leads worked with CWIT Affiliates alum Brenasia Ward-Caldwell to facilitate a virtual event that she led called “A Crash Course in Blockchain: An Intro to Crypto”
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This year, we combined the BLAST Off event for high school freshman and sophomore girls with the Bits & Bytes event for high school junior girls, allowing both groups to meet one another, but then attend sessions specific to their grade level. The events were held both virtually (on Sunday, February 20) and in person (on Monday, February 21), with each day serving a different group of students.
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For the third year in a row, Spring into Leadership was held as a virtual event. Our keynote speaker was Nicole Pelsinsky of Amazon, whose talk was titled, “Surprising Things I Didn’t Know I’d Need in a Tech Role.” She shared a list of seven of these “surprising things,” including “the importance of being able to tell a story,” “dealing with ambiguity,” and “the power of asking questions.” After her talk, event attendees went into breakout rooms to discuss how their own experiences have related to the topics covered in Ms. Pelsinsky’s talk.
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April 22nd’s Welcome to CWIT event hosted 36 students from our Scholars & Affiliates Programs, in addition to family & friends of CWIT. The Welcome event began with ice-breakers and presentations on the CWIT values of academic, inclusive, professional, and personal excellence. Following the presentations were opportunities for new students to meet in small groups with faculty, staff, alumni, and upper-class students.
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CWIT Showcase was one of very few events that we did not host at all while we were operating fully or partially virtually during the pandemic, so we were excited to bring this event back in April 2022! Set up like a miniature version of a professional conference, the event gave our students the opportunity to share their research, leadership experiences, personal projects, and more with their peers in the CWIT community as well as with the high school students who attended the event as part of the Welcome to CWIT experience.
We had the largest number of student presenters and presentations that we have had in the history of this event. With 29 presenters offering 17 different presentations during three rounds of concurrent sessions, there was something to suit everyone’s interests. A few of the session titles included, “It Grew on Me: My Research Experience with Fungus,” “Our World in Games,” “The Entrepreneurial Mindset,” and “The Fulbright Application Process,” just to name a few.
Click here for more info and photos about this and other items from this newsletter.
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CWIT LLC Activities
The 2021-22 school year was an exciting time on the CWIT LLC!For the first time since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, the residents were able to enjoy a wide range of activities both on and off campus.
RA Mei Vader organized a number of fun events for the residents, such as a Paper Airplane Competition, Family Dinners, a Craft & Calm night, a trip to DC, a CWIT Formal Prom, and supplied frequent festive decorations throughout the year.
Click here for more info and photos about this and other items from this newsletter.
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2021-22 RA Mei Vader with LLC residents on Craft & Calm Night to relax and destress before finals.
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The CWIT Team was thrilled to host our very much-missed Annual Family Picnic in May. We celebrated with over 200 students, family, and friends of CWIT. Our festivities took over the UMBC Commons Tent, Commons Mainstreet, and The Quad. Everyone enjoyed a delicious picnic of hamburgers, veggie/vegan burgers, hot dogs, BBQ chicken, baked beans, corn-on-the-cob, potato salad, coleslaw, watermelon, and ice cream!
Games and Activities:
- T-shirt tie-dying station
- Paint kits for wall decor, kids wooden plane, and wooden treasure chest
- Bubble wands
- Scavenger Hunt
- Mini skee-ball
- Jumbo Connect 4
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The CWIT Escape Room Committee, led by CWIT Scholar Danielle Rhoten, have designed virtual and in-person game experiences for the CWIT Community and high school students. This spring semester, the Escape Room committee worked with the Information Systems Department to transform a professor’s office into our first in-person full space Escape Room Tournament! Several teams competed to beat the clock by solving puzzles, riddles, searching high and low for keys, and unlocking the code to escape!
During the New Scholar Retreat this summer, Danielle Rhoten and her family created a full life-size Candyland board game with games and puzzles for the new Scholars to complete. This interactive and engaging experience promoted teamwork, critical thinking, and a thorough understanding of the Scholar expectations agreement!
Click here for more info and photos about this and other items from this newsletter.
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The CWIT Team took a crack at the Escape Room and solved the mystery in 36 minutes!
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From July 22 to July 24, we were thrilled to host New Scholar Retreat in person for the first time since 2019. Thirty seven incoming CWIT, Cyber, and T-SITE Scholars spent three days getting to know one another, learning about CWIT, and discovering what it means to be a part of our community. They took part in sessions to help them prepare for their transitions to UMBC and/or to being a Scholar, to better understand CWIT's mission and how they can contribute to it, and to increase their level of comfort with professional networking, among other topics.
Click here for more info and photos about this and other items from this newsletter.
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(L) Scholars at the College Park Challenge Course; (R) Scholars dressed to impress at the Formal Dinner
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Building STEPS/CWIT Collaboration
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For the second year in a row, CWIT has maintained a collaborative relationship with Building STEPS, a college access and success nonprofit that works with students from 15 different public high schools in Baltimore City. Their mission, to “equip our city’s brightest students with the tools to propel them to college and career success,” and to immerse their students in experiences related to STEM and healthcare pathways complements the goals of CWIT’s K-12 Ambassadors program and CWIT’s overall goal of pipeline development.
Click here for more info and photos about this and other items from this newsletter.
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Alumni at COEIT 30th Happy Hour
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Katherine Geisler (C11) – Completed a graduate certificate in Robotics Engineering from the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS).
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Samantha McDonald (C11) – Graduated with PhD in Informatics for UC Irvine last spring. Started working for Meta as a UX Researcher in August 2021.
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Christina Malliakos (C9) – Baby Sophia Knepper was born July 1!
- Anastasia Raffucci (T1) – I am lucky to be part of the Artemis project and work on the web application front-end and backend supporting control room operators at NASA. My team and I are in anticipation of SLS launch at the end of August or beginning of September. Really cool stuff is going on!
- Jessica Adams (Affiliates, ‘22) – I started a full time job at Northrop Grumman!
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Ways to Connect & Get Involved
- You can give to CWIT and share our giving form with your network of friends at this link: http://gritstarter.umbc.edu/cwit
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Speak to current students at Cyber Practicum (Fridays, 11am-12pm; cyber, AI, or data science topics welcome; in-person or virtual) -- contact Cindy at cindyg@umbc.edu for more info
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Fall Career Networking Event -- 10/18, 6-8pm, In Person, UMBC University Center Ballroom
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Copyright © 2022. The Center for Women in Technology at UMBC All rights reserved.
Our mailing address is:
Center for Women in Technology
University of Maryland, Baltimore County
1000 Hilltop Circle, ITE 452
Baltimore, MD 21250
Phone: 410-455-2822
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