Women in Computer Science (WiCS) Mentorship Program

To complete the Social Consciousness Competency, I participated as a mentor in the Spring 2025 and Spring 2026 WiCS Mentorship Programs. The mentorship program allowed me, the mentor, to engage in outreach by giving back to the community of women and minorities in computing. The program runs every semester, and matches upperclassmen mentors with underclassmen mentees.

Throughout the Spring 2025 semester I met with my mentees to give professional, academic, and general advice. As a result, I contributed to a strengthened community within our club, as well as in Fulton. Throughout the program, I also coordinated and led my mentees in a technical project where they learned real-world skills and an end product that could be put on their resumes. These skills include Github version control, Python, Visual Studio Code, and Linux, all of which are used both in ASU coursework and in the industry. Furthermore, the skill of communication and problem solving could be applied not just to computer science but to all engineering disciplines. After the Spring 2025 program concluded, I maintained a friendly relationship with my mentees and still regularly see them at WiCS events, indicative of the community engagement and growth that the program produces.

I am currently involved in the Spring 2026 program as a mentor to fulfill the 80 hours required for the competency. Currently, my Spring 2026 mentorship group is using machine learning models to classify fake news articles. This first involved a preliminary research period and overview on machine learning principles. Up until this point, we have downloaded a fake news dataset from Kaggle, processed it with the Pandas Library, and trained a Naive Bayes model to classify the fake news. Through the rest of the semester we plan to train two to three more models and compare their performance, and finally present it at the Spring 2026 Banquet.

The mentorship program has a strong alignment with sustainability, which is my theme. In particular it contributes to social sustainability by fostering inclusion and equal opportunity. Computer science in particular is a field that has been historically and statistically underrepesented by women. By mentoring women and underrepresented students, the program helps reduce such barriers of underrepresentation, as participants develop professional and prevalent technical skills, while simultaneously building a supportive community within the club. For example, several WiCS mentorship participants put their projects on their resumes and talk about WiCS during technical interviews. The program runs every semester and is overseen by a dedicated officer, ensuring that mentorship, insight, and community engagement continue for future generations, creating lasting social impact and maintaining a socially sustainable environment.