WE Local Des Moines (2 years later) was a success!  It was so great to be back in person to see so many familiar faces.  SWE-ECI was fortunate enough to have a WE Local right next door this year!

WE Local kicked off with a great Friday morning keynote, Megan Lewis from Corteva, who was a ball of energy that really set the tone for the conference.  She talked a lot about understanding what your brand is and what your big rocks in life are.  She preached ensuring that you are conscious of what your energy boosters are vs what your energy drainers are and create a plan to balance them out!

Various other sessions on Courageous Conversations, Gender Bias', SWENext, and many many more topics were attended.  All sessions provided nuggets of value to its attendees.  

On top of seeing familiar faces, it was great to meet and network with many new faces.  It was awesome meeting people that had such different backgrounds and have taken such different paths in life.  

Lastly, the career fair featured many companies eager to get more female engineers on their teams!

SWE-ECI is looking forward to WE22 in Houston, TX coming up October 20 - 22nd.  And we are eager to see where next years WE Locals will take us!

To celebrate E-Week virtually this year, SWE-ECI put together a set of STEM Challenges that were to be completed during E-Week. Participants recruited a group of family members, fellow engineers or went solo for this fun challenge which took ~30-60 mins to complete! The challenges touched on various engineering disciplines, and contained topics that were fun for all ages. If you'd like to complete the Challenge yourself, you can access it here.
At a follow on Happy Hour, we presented the additional awards for the First Entry and Most Creative submissions. There was also a raffle with the attendees of the happy hour. The winners (Team Woodson, The Wagners and Beth Blanco) all went home with a very special 'Women of NASA' LEGO set.
Thank you to all who participated in our challenge and hope you all had a lovely E-Week celebrating you!