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!

On January 22nd, SWE-ECI judged and sponsored a Special Award for Most Diverse Infrastructure at the Iowa Regional Future City competition that was hosted virtually this year. The competition is a national, project-based learning experience where students in 6th, 7th, and 8th grade imagine, design, and build cities of the future. The 2021-2022 theme was A Waste-Free Future where the students designed a waste-free city using the principles of a circular economy.

We saw firsthand how the students used math and science principles to solve real-world issues. The SWE-ECI sponsored Special Award was presented to Ciudad Verde from Take Action United. Congratulations!

"The energy of breakthrough performance", the perfect theme for SWE-ECI's Professional New Year New You Event. 

Jackie Pelland has over 25 years of leadership development experience and believes the basic premise of leadership hasn't changed in about 200,000 years. Jackie touched on many subtle points during her presentation and how the brain works - the Human Operating system. Energy is how we experience life. It is determined by our thoughts, feelings, and actions and how this is affecting our leadership style. 

Jackie left us with practical ideas on how we can form daily habits, re-discovering the thought process, and channeling our responses in the right direction.

Below is the core of Jackie's Mental Model at different energy levels we experience every single day. Think about where you are today!!!

If you were not able to join, but would like to watch the recording - please find that here. 

On Wednesday December 15th, as a token of our appreciation for being a paid SWE-ECI member, we hosted a virtual Holiday Celebration.  At the celebration we got our creative juices flowing with making nail string art!  It was so relaxing doing this craft and chatting.  We even played a challenging game "Guess the Christmas Song based on the emojis!".  Thank you to everyone that could join!  Also shout out to The Knotty Nail in West Des Moines for providing this great kits!  Check out some of the finished products below! 

On Thursday November 18th SWE-ECI met to discuss learnings and key take away's from WE21, SWE's annual conference that was held in Indianapolis and virtually this year.  Thank you to Kristen Wagner, Darcy Magee, Kristen Snow, and Amanda Oskey for sharing your key take aways from the conference!  We learned about some great outreach tools, all the networking perks to attending WE21 in person, an so much more!  We all appreciated getting the down-low on WE21 Indianapolis.  We are looking forward to WE22 in Houston!​

SWE-ECI had a wonderful time volunteering at the Iowa City Halloween Carnival on Friday October 29th.  They brought supplies for a STEM activity to make Harry Potter Wands with popsicle sticks, copper tape, an LED light bulb and battery.  It was a great opportunity to educate and show young children how circuits work!  Our booth was non stop for the entire event - kids and parents loved the activity! SWE-ECI looks forward to participating in this event again next year. 

On Monday September 27th, SWE-ECI met with the University of Iowa SWE Section to discuss tips for their Engineering Career Fair that was held on Thursday September 30th.  It was a great informal meeting that allowed the University of Iowa ladies to ask many great questions regarding resumes, career fair, applications, and interviews.  SWE-ECI was able to have professional representation from a wide variety of companies in size and disciplines which allowed us to provide feedback on how to change your approach based on the company.  We talked about how you can leverage your participation and leadership in SWE when talking with companies and throughout the interview process.  SWE-ECI is so thankful for continuing our strong relationship with the University of Iowa SWE Section and we hope they had a successful Career Fair!