Region B Conference

On January 29th, 12 SWE UCLA members flew off to Phoenix, Arizona to start off the year at the annual SWE Region B Conference. After checking into the Sheraton, they headed downtown to Sam’s Café for a welcome dinner where they enjoyed delicious Tex-Mex and had a chance to talk to SWE members coming from schools in Utah, Nevada, Arizona, and California.

Saturday was the focal point of the conference, beginning early in the morning with breakfast and speeches by the keynote speakers, Tauny Woo and Siddika Demir, who encouraged the audience to take advantage of all that SWE has to offer and shared their experiences of success when working hard and setting goals. Breakfast was followed by a full morning of workshops on topics that were geared to help women better understand their workplace and on how to improve their careers. This included everything from making decisions about graduate school to leading and managing projects. One of the workshops in particular, titled “Emotional Intelligence,” gave pointers on how to control one’s own emotions and also observe and respond correctly to others'.

Lunch was set up as a networking event where SWE collegiates and professional members mixed it up and sat interspersed at different tables. It was a unique opportunity to ask questions, learn from one another and form relationships. Before the tiramisu was even able to be digested the career fair was opened and all conference participants were invited to talk to companies as large as Intel and the Air Force to smaller, private companies, based in Arizona. In concurrence with the career fair was another session of afternoon workshops covering topics such as “How to Build Awareness,” “Staying Up to Date and Technical,” and “The Joy and Art of Communication.” All SWE collegiate members attended the collegiate meeting where the Region Collegiate Representatives led a discussion on SWE goals and ended with each chapter sharing its “best practice,” an activity that was particularly successful.

The day ended with dinner and an exciting raffle. Keynote speaker, Joan Koerber-Walker, gave a motivational speech on how she got to where she is today and the obstacles she had to overcome in the process. She stressed that sometimes she simply had to follow her gut instinct, and she never let anyone give her "no" as a final answer. She gave advice on sticking to what you believe in and finding others who value those convictions as well. Dinner concluded with the much anticipated raffle where at least one person from each table generously received a prize hidden under the table, and our own president, Tiffany Tsao, won the coveted iPod nano!

This year’s SWE Regional Conference was a great opportunity to build the network that SWE so highly promotes, especially among women engineers, and reminded all participants of the purpose and goals of the organization. SWE is pushing forward with higher levels of communication between professional and collegiate members, outreach events for young girls to stir up interest in engineering, and fundraisers for scholarships. Hopefully, those of us who were able to attend can continue to achieve these aspects of SWE here at UCLA and have a great time doing it!

Renee Lau

Secretary