More than 200 young women from 30 high schools in Massachusetts and the region attended the Engineering and Computing Career Day Conference held on campus on Oct. 27th, 2014. The program aims to inspire and encourage female high school students to pursue engineering or computer science in higher education and to choose it as a career path.
The event included a keynote presentation from industrial engineering alumna Renee Harbers Liddell, founder and CEO of Harbers Family Foundation, as well as hands-on computing and engineering activity sessions. School of Computer Science professor Benjamin Marlin led three 50-minute computer programming activity sessions facilitated by 15 computer science student volunteers from across the School. The three sessions were attended by a total of nearly 90 participants.
Career Day attendees also had a chance to tour engineering and computer science labs and meet with industry representatives from Raytheon, Google, BAE Systems, Fiksu, Vistaprint, Pegasystems, Tighe and Bond, and Verizon (Land, Wireless, and Terremark).
The conference is sponsored by the College of Engineering, the School of Computer Science, Raytheon and Women for UMass Amherst. Laptops for the School of Computer Science hands-on activities were provided by CAITE.