Society of Women Engineers

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