Six students and one faculty member represented Washington and Lee at this year’s Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing in Baltimore, MD. The student-focused conference features both technical and professional development sessions.
Haley, Sam, Cory, and Deirdre at the entryway for the conference
Alicia Bargar ’13, Samantha O’Dell ’15, and Cory Walker ’15 were awarded ultra-competitive scholarships to attend. Having three scholarship winners from W&L–out of 300 scholarships awarded and many, many more applicants–is quite impressive! Haley Archer-McClellan ’15, Deirdre Tobin ’15, and Wenda Tu ’14 were generously supported by the Provost’s Office.
All students agreed the conference was an inspiring and motivating experience and the career fair opened their eyes to a lot of opportunities.
Some highlights:
- Cory won a Ninja Coder t-shirt from Amazon for programming the Fibonacci sequence in Python
- Wenda met an executive from GE and had an enlightening conversation that covered some diverse topics, including material for Wenda’s Feminist Social and Political Philosophy course.
Haley, Alicia, and Deirdre at the Inner Harbor. The RockIT Science and Systers 25th Anniversary Celebration was held at the Maryland Science Center.
Professor Sprenkle attended the conference as a representative of the GHC Academic Advisory Board, helped lead the Faculty Speed Networking session, helped organize the Faculty Lightning Talks, and served as a judge of the undergraduate student research competition.
The theme of this year’s conference was “Are We There Yet?” While the answer seems to clearly be “no”, W&L is definitely making strides in the right direction.
Posted by Sara Sprenkle 
