Willamette Valley Section - SWE eNews Summer 2018

The 19th annual Willamette Valley Engineers Week Banquet held on the Oregon State University campus on February 26th was a great success. The banquet provides a venue for members of the Willamette Valley engineering community to come together and celebrate the engineering profession. We had over 260 attendees, one of the largest audiences in the history of the banquet. The theme for the 2018 Engineers Week was “Engineers Inspiring Wonder – Celebrate, Volunteer, Connect.” This event served as a great venue for celebrating and connecting. Our keynote speaker, Michael Foss, a Senior Manager of Logistics Optimization, Compliance, and Controls with Amazon Transportation Services shared his experiences and reflections during his talk entitled, “Keys to Success for today’s Engineer.” We recognized three, local middle school students as our essay contest winners. 500-word essays about women in science and engineering were judged on various criteria. Each winner received a $75 amazon gift card, sponsored by Georgia Pacific. Caroline Gao wrote an essay on Rosalind Franklin. Caroline attends North Albany Middle School, and her teacher is Katy Kelly. Our second winner Kate Voltz wrote about Marie Tharp. Kate attends Cheldelin Middle School, and her teacher is Jennifer Davis. Our third winner Ming Wong wrote about Chien-Shiung Wu. Ming attends North Albany Middle School, and his teacher is Mary Hannan.

We concluded the banquet by recognizing three, soon to be engineers with three scholarships. The first scholarship is funded through an endowment that was created by the generous contributions of many WVS SWE members and friends over the years. The second scholarship is funded by a generous donation from HP Inc. and the third scholarship is funded by a generous donation from Georgia-Pacific.

Scholarship recipients are selected based on their academic achievements, leadership and community roles, as well as an essay describing why they want to be an engineer and what the scholarship will mean to them. Shengmei Hu who is a senior at Henry D. Sheldon High School in Eugene, Oregon was selected as the 2018 WVS-SWE Endowment Scholarship recipient. Hsin Wei (Sheena) Huang, who is a senior at South Eugene High School was selected as the 2018 HP, Inc Scholarship recipient. Morgan Cooper, who is a senior at Corvallis High School was selected as the 2018 Georgia-Pacific Scholarship recipient.

Nearly 100 OSU College of Engineering students were able to attend the banquet due to the generous support of industry and individual sponsors. We would like to recognize all of our banquet sponsors, including Adidas, the Albany American Association of University Women, ATI Metals, Blount, Cindy Dahl, the Collaborative Robotics and Intelligent Systems (CoRIS) Institute, Daimler Trucks, Georgia Pacific, HP Inc., Intel, Leatherman, NuScale Power, OSU College of Engineering, OSU School of CBEE, OSU School of MIME, OSU School CCE, and WVS-SWE.

PDX Women in Tech Summer Soiree

The PDX Women in Tech Summer Soiree will be in held on Thursday, July 19 from 5:30-8:30 PM.

Kimberlé W. Crenshaw, a civil rights advocate, feminist and UCLA School of Law and Columbia Law professor specializing in race and gender issues, coined the term intersectionality to describe how people's various identities (racial, gender, class. etc.) intersect and overlap (e.g., being both Black and a woman, both queer and poor) within a structured system of power, creating a cumulative effect in the discrimination they receive.

At this year’s summer soiree, we dedicate our theme to our proclamation that the future of tech depends on an intersectional lens—otherwise, the technologies that are being developed today will not consider the needs of large swaths of our population and thus will not succeed.

OSU’s Harriet Nembhard, PhD will be moderating a panel of leaders in the spaces of blockchain, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence to demonstrate the accessibility of these spaces to the people of our community and to contribute to an ongoing loop of action-relection-action that advances social justice.

The event is free, but registration is required (click on the link above). It will be held in Portland at Weiden+Kennedy (224 NW 13th Ave). If you have an interest in carpooling from campus, please send an email to Christina Olson (christina.olson@oregonstate.edu) by July 12th. She will confirm rides by July 13th.