This year's event was another great success! Twenty-six Junior Girl Scouts attended "Step into STEM!" hosted by SWE-ECI, where they spent the day learning about engineering and participating in various activities. A few of the activities included using ASCII to "code" the letters of their name into a necklace, building a robot using a toothbrush head and pager motor, and making super slime! The day wrapped up with what turned out to be the girls' favorite event, which was an Egg Drop team activity. For this event, groups of two or three girls had a limited budget to 'purchase' supplies for their device which was aimed to protect an egg from cracking when dropped from an elevated height. We had many successful teams! 

SWE-ECI would like to send a big thanks to the 33 volunteers that help make this event possible. It's always wonderful to see the next generation excited about STEM! ​

                The annual conference for SWE was held in Philadelphia from Thursday, Oct 27- Saturday, Oct 29th and hosted over 11,000 attendees. The attendees were a healthy mixture of collegiate students and professionals from all over the world. The theme of this year’s conference was “Life’s Variable: SWE’s Your Constant” and it was where women engineers found the constant support they need for life’s variables.
                WE16 had a mixture of professional/collegiate development sessions, networking opportunities, and the world’s largest career fair for women in engineering and technology. The conference kicked off with an opening keynote breakfast addressed by Luann Pendy, Ph.D., who serves as Senior Vice President, Global Quality at Medtronic, plc. One of the key takeaways from her speech was and advice she gave to the larger audience was, “learn your craft, learn your business and take risk.” She also said, “Dream Big, Princess” and actually believe you can achieve greatness. This was a good reminder to ourselves and something we should all be actively working on every day. There were many different sessions and panels following the keynote ranging from topics like unconscious bias, managing dual careers, renewable energy innovations to name a few.
                For Region H updates, please click here. We recommend you follow this blog to keep to yourself updated on region news. The 2017 Region H Conference will be in Ann Arbor, MI on March 10-12. The call for speakers is open! Apply here if interested; applications are due by November 13 at 11:59pm EST. Registration will be going live around mid-November. Visit the Region H Conference website for more information. We hope to see you there!