Society of Women Engineers

How many "collegiate transition" workshops have you been to? Presenter Pam Androff thought she was adequately prepared, but still experienced many pitfalls, obstacles, and headaches on her journey to successfully make it in the Real World.   This workshop will focus on everything collegiate SWE members need to know while still in school to avoid common mistakes that may hinder your success.  Be prepared to hear everything Pam wishes she had known- including what other collegiate transition workshops have left out! Topics that will be covered include dealing with leaving university life, job search 101, real-world etiquette, and taking risks.

Pam Androff is an HVAC consultant engineer with Newcomb & Boyd in Atlanta, GA. She has been involved with the Society of Women Engineers since 2004, with leadership positions including Region D Collegiate Membership Coordinator, Region D Collegiate Representative, Region D Webmaster, member of the Region Conference Task Force, member of the Government Relations and Public Policy committee, and UCF Conference Co-Chair. She is also involved with ASHRAE, ASME, USGBC, and public policy issues with engineering. Pam graduated from the University of Central Florida with a Bachelors of Science in Mechanical Engineering in December 2008. She can be reached at pandroff@newcomb-boyd.com

Our SWE section at SPSU is relatively new. We just re-established ourselves last year, and recruitment has been a bit of a challenge for us. Aside from the fact that SPSU?s male-to-female ratio is especially disproportionate (not many women, but that is improving!), a high percentage of our student are non-traditional, and therefore tend to be particularly hard to recruit.

Over the summer, while making recruitment plans for the first week of class, our president, Cindy, noted that the Greek organizations all had large, attractive wooded letters to represent their fraternities. She came up with a lovely idea for a SWE sign with a moving gear. Cindy and her father thought up the design, built the sign, and then our executive officers got together to paint and finally assemble it.

(Video clip of Cindy Spinning the Gear: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yeAsk8XgF8k)

It was a lot of fun ? an awesome way to bond as a team ? and the final product looks great! In addition to the sign, we hand-painted a SWE banner made from a vinyl table cloth which we all absolutely love!

All our hard work paid off and we were able to attract lots of students to our ?Welcome Week? info table. People were stopping to ask us ?Who made the sign?? and ?What is SWE?? It was great.

As well as expanding our membership, we wanted to be able to offer a something exciting and fun to our members. We were aiming for something easy and enjoyable for everyone?

Last year, as an ultra low-budget fundraiser, we held a Bellydance workshop taught by Sarabell, our current V.P., and charged $2.00 for admission. However, after the positive response to the workshop, and finding a 2nd Bellydance instructor/SWE recruit, Jennifer, we decided to offer workshops for free this year as a fun and educational social event! Also, our new campus connection, Ben (he?s a black belt!!!), has offered to instruct a free self-defense workshop for our SWE section! Our first workshop will be next week on September 24th. We?re looking forward to a great event!

SWE-SPSU is still a small section, but we have AWSOME members (and amazing officers, advisors and committeewomen too!). We?re learning more about how to grow and cultivate our section every day.

SWE-SPSU members working crazy hard making smoothies at our recent fundraiser

We got together and paint the SWE sign around 4 PM Saturday. It was very fun cause we can mess with paints - eh hem - good paints. Those colors showed up on the camera nicely. Hopefully we can finish it by the school start.

We also met Jennifer Adams, our future SWE member and 1 of the belly dance instructors, and did some planning on SWE Activities and Fund raising Events. It was very interesting to hear many ideas from her. Keep it up Jennie! And also welcome to SWE! :-)

I have to mention that Verity did a great job on coloring with primer and green and yellow colors. Sara W and Dee did great on outline the gear. It looks fantastic! Also thanks Jennifer and Robert for helping!


Will upload pictures very soon! Keep checking our blog!

Cindy Nguyen

We went to the SWE Region D Conference in Charlotte, North Carolina. It was pretty fun driving, and get pull over by a cop because we drove too slow. WOW!

The Conference was pretty fun. We did a personality test to know more about ourselves, and learn to communicate with others that have different personalities than us. Then we learned about how to thin creatively, all sort of good stuff.

I enjoyed my first Conference a lot. It was sad that Dee couldn't come because the Student Center didn't give her permission to go. How nice of them!
~ The pictures of the Conference will be up in Photo Gallery very soon ~

Keep checking on our blog for more to come!

Cindy Nguyen