Dallas SWE has a lot of exciting events planned for you this spring! Please join us: we would love to see you at one of our upcoming meetings or outreach events.
April 25. 2015, time and location TBD: Leadership workshop with ASME
Additional opportunities to get involved:
High-Tech High Heels is a local organization that partners with Dallas SWE. They are seeking volunteers for a speakers bureau for periodic requests that are all over the metroplex such as school career days, speaking in classrooms and special events like robotics competitions and panels. Almost all volunteer opportunities are one-time events, so it is perfect for the busy professional who may have the occasional space in their schedule to volunteer. Please contact Kristen Parrish with further questions.
Dallas SWE offers scholarships to graduating female high school seniors from the Dallas area, are majoring in engineering. Scholarships are based on academic excellence. The deadline for applications is April 15, 2015. Click here for more information!
Our March Professional Development Meeting is sponsored by Emerson Process! Emerson is a global leader in bringing technology and engineering together to provide innovative solutions for customers in industrial, commercial, and consumer markets around the world. Founded in 1890 in St. Louis, Missouri (USA), Emerson delivers solutions through five business segments: Process Management, Industrial Automation, Network Power, Climate Technologies, and Commercial & Residential Solutions. With sales of $24.7B and more than 130,000 employees in over 150 countries, we have a customer-focused, results-driven culture where employee performance is recognized and rewarded. Join Dallas SWE as we tour the Emerson facility and hear career advice from some of Emerson’s outstanding women!
When: Tuesday, March 17, 2015
6:00 pm – Networking starts
6:30pm – Speaker Presentations and Site Tour
7:30pm – Dallas SWE Announcements
Last day to resister for event is March 15th (we have to give Emerson the list of attendees)
Attendees can park anywhere
Please arrive a few minutes early for security check-in
About the Speakers
Stephanie Law is currently Vice President, Marketing and eBusiness for the global Regulator business. Stephanie joined Emerson in 1994 and has held various positions in Regulators, including but not limited to Applications Engineer, Director of Marketing when the Industrial business was initially formed, Director of Commercial Service Regulators, and most recently served as Vice President, Marketing for the Natural Gas business. In addition, Stephanie was on a short international assignment in France for the Natural Gas business.
Stephanie received her BS in Chemical Engineering from South Dakota School of Mines and received her MBA from the University of Iowa.
Susan Hughes joined Emerson in 2003 and is currently Vice President / General Manager of Tescom, a business within Emerson. Susan is responsible for Tescom’s global business which includes all functional areas such as sales, marketing, engineering, finance, human resources and operations. The Tescom business has manufacturing sites in Germany, Minnesota and Shanghai. Prior to her role as Vice President / General Manger, Susan spent five years in China with Emerson as a Plant Manager in Shanghai and as the Director of Research and Development and Marketing in Nanjing.
Susan has her bachelor’s degree from Grinnell College in Mathematics and Chinese. She has her MBA from Washington University in St. Louis.
To those of you planning on attending She Networks, She Wins tomorrow night, we’ve gotten word that it has been rescheduled due to expected inclement weather. The new date is March 18, 2015. Registrants will receive an official communication from SMU SWE soon.
Dallas SWE members and officers attended the 2015 Region C Conference February 6-8! Hosted by the University of Texas at Austin SWE section, it was a full weekend of learning, networking, and celebrating successes in our Region (Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas) over the past year. You can visit the conference website here.
On Friday, Dallas SWE members carpooled down I-35 and arrived in Austin to find a welcoming Casino Night social hour. Guests learned how to play Blackjack, Poker, Roulette, and Craps. At the end of the evening, we cashed in our chips for raffle tickets: over 20 drawings were held for the prizes! The evening was a great opportunity to network with collegiates and professionals.
Saturday’s breakfast keynote speakers included Peter Zornio, Chief Strategy Officer at Emerson Process and Polly Bessel, Vice President of Transport Engineering at AT&T. They offered technology updates from their respective industries and some inspirational words of encouragement to the next generation of women engineers. After breakfast, several speakers from Region C leadership conducted a joint Region meeting (professionals and collegiates). Region business topics covered communication strategies (email, website, blogs, social media), the Region C Tactical Plan, an update from our SWE Senators, introduction of a proposed new SWE logo, and the announcement of the Region C FY16 officer slate. A lot of really cool things are happening in SWE!
Professionals and collegiates then split off into separate meetings. In the professional meeting we got updates on financials and membership for the region, voted on a financial proposal, and then broke off into some brainstorming groups on the topics of leadership pipeline planning, society committee participation, and leadership retreat planning for the summer of 2015. The brainstorming sessions were a very productive way to capture feedback from section representatives on these important region topics. After the professional meeting ended, the first workshop sessions began and the career fair opened to conference attendees!
During lunch Saturday, SWE Speaker of the Senate Brittney Elko delivered the FY15 State of SWE address. We also got to hear FY16 Region Conference Bid presentations from the University of Arkansas and Texas A&M University. Your Dallas SWE Section Representatives will vote for the location of the FY16 conference in next few weeks. After lunch, there were three more workshop session slots to attend and the career fair continued. There were over 20 companies present at this year’s career fair!
In the evening, professionals enjoyed a networking social hour at the conference host hotel before taking a short shuttle ride over to the Etter-Harbin Alumni Center for the Award Banquet. Guest speaker Anita Gale gave an inspiring and charismatic address, giving her insights from her long career in engineering on the Space Shuttle Program and her involvement in international aerospace design competitions that encourage young students to pursue STEM careers. The award presentations included section awards for successful membership campaigns and outreach programs as well as individual awards for career success and SWE service. Dallas SWE Section Representative and Webmaster Shelley Stracener received a Governor’s Choice Award from Region C Governor Dianne Beever for her service to Region C as their Webmaster and Social Media Manager in FY14 and FY15. Check out the live Tweeting she did from the conference at the Region C Twitter page!
From left to right: Anique Cooley, Cherrie Fisher, Amanda Posadas, Barbara Read, Shelley Stracener, Nandika D’Souza, Zaineb AhmadFrom left to right: Kashmira Engineer, Shilpa Nagaraj, Barbara Read, Zaineb Ahmad, Amanda Posadas, Cherrie Fisher, Shelley Stracener, Anique Cooley
This was the first Region C Conference some Dallas SWE members had attended and their reactions were overwhelmingly positive.
“Loved my first Region C conference. The keynote speaker from Boeing was great. The seminar by the Biotech company CEO was especially good. She was motivating us to try new opportunities that we generally consider ourselves not ready for. I liked that. All the logistics for such a huge event was planned out well and everything went on seamlessly.The seminar on ’10 things to do with your money’ was very basic and I think addressed the student group rather than the professional group. That could have been a little better. “
~ Shilpa Nagaraj
“What I liked the most was the brainstorming we did during our road trip to Austin – looking forward to implementing those ideas in the coming months! It was also great to find out how other SWE sections plus another region (Region I) are doing, and get ideas from them. I also enjoyed getting an advance look at the proposed new logo for Society of Women Engineers.
I would definitely recommend attending future region conferences to other members. It is a great way to meet and network with other members of Region C, both professional and collegiate.
~ Barbara Read, Dallas SWE President
Here are some ways to get involved in SWE at the Region and Society level:
Spaghetti and Marshmallows- Brain Food a la Dallas SWE
The Dallas SWE participated in the first Dallas ISD STEM Day initiative invited by Oswaldo Alvarenga and Crystal Alexander of the Dallas ISD STEM department. The initiative was held at Skyline High School and brought over a 1000 children and their parents to the event. Latischa Hanson, Zaineb Ahmed, Shannon Norman, Kitty Elshot, Nandika D’Souza and Cherrie Fisher made their way to the school. Cherrie Fisher organized the actitivity and led an information filled discussion on how our lives as engineers reflect the joy and opportunity to think daily, to create, execute and optimize our ideas. Three sessions between 12:30 and 3:30 on the hour received a range of attendees. In all 64 children formed teams of 2-4 students and parents were given 20 uncooked spaghetti noodles, 3 feet of tape, 3 feet of string, and a marshmallow. The task was simple: build the tallest possible freestanding tower with the materials provided, with the marshmallow on top.
Dallas SWE Vice President Cherrie Fisher and students with their spaghetti marshmallow tower!
Given only 18 minutes to complete their task, everyone got to building. Some groups used their observations of the world around them and applied it to their design: “chairs have 4 legs, so should our tower” or “bridges have those crisscrossing bars, let’s do that!” Some groups just started building and hoped for the best.
The results were interesting. Of the towers built, only about a quarter of the towers were stable, freestanding structures. Why, we asked the participants? Why were only some teams successful? Students and parents of Dallas ISD realized quickly the most successful teams showed strong teamwork skills, discussing their design back and forth, and encourage new ideas. Also, participants pinpointed that teams, which assumed the tower would hold the weight of their marshmallow at the end, would usually have a tower to buckle at the last-second; conversely, teams that tested after each stage of building had a higher rate of a successful standing tower. Teams also mentioned that they did not think to use the string often enough because they immediately discounted its value.
At the end of the day, several students said they learned something, even if their tower collapsed. Parents asked questions about encouraging and motivating their students into STEM fields. An educator showed interest in more activities to keep her students engaged in STEM and thanked Dallas SWE for our involvement in and impact on DISD STEM Day.
