Tonight was our annual Corporate Spotlight Event sponsored by Capital One! We met at Jasper’s in Plano for an evening of networking, tasty refreshments, and insights from our special guest speaker, Celie Niehaus. She shared with the 30 attendees her experiences in Capital One’s Compliance department, how she’s become a strong female leader in that organization, and how important it is to her that Capital One values her individual contributions towards their goal of making baking better.
Celie focused especially on how important individual performance is, whether you’re a man or woman, no matter what role you find yourself filling in an organization. She emphasized how crucial it is for recruitment teams to speak openly about the benefits of diversity programs and invest time and resources into encouraging engineers to make the most of their unique thought processes even if they are not currently in “traditional” engineering roles. She was also adamant that women bring the same skills and abilities to the table as men do, if we will only resist hesitation, take on new opportunities as they present themselves, and excel in the face of those challenges.
Her experience at Capital One has been one of inclusion, personal connections, and opportunities for achievement. There were several representatives from her team in attendance, and guests were invited to sign up to Capital One’s job notification system for positions in their fields of interest. Capital One has been a strong supporter of Dallas SWE the past two years and has contributed financially to our outreach series, Design Your World: STEM Conference for Girls. If you are interested in the career opportunities available at Capital One, visit their job website here.
After the Capital One program, Dallas SWE President for FY15 Barbara Read went through the SWE portion of the agenda, announcing upcoming events and important information about Region C and SWE HQ conferences. You can view the agenda here: July 15, 2014 Meeting Agenda.
Of special note is our call for interest to Committee Chair positions. You can view a list of committee descriptions here. If you are interested in any position, please email us or fill out our Call for Interest Survey to let us know. Dallas SWE is an all-volunteer-run organization and we need your help to make FY15 a success!