Aragon’s Society of Women Engineers (SWE) traveled to Twitter Headquarters in San Francisco on March 19. Primarily chaperoned by Computer Science teacher Lisa Kossiver, a total of 34 female students attended the field trip.
“The field trip was meant to be for any girl at Aragon that was interested in seeing the inner workings of a tech company, such as Twitter,” said SWE President senior Meiling Thompson. “I sent the signup form to SWE club members, to girls in AP Computer Science, and to some girls in other STEM clubs such as Robotics. I also posted it on School Loop announcements. Any boy could have signed up, but since Women in Engineering was hosting the event we gave priority to girls that signed up, and [we] capped it at 35 because of the chaperone limit.”
The cabinet members of SWE began organizing the field trip at the beginning of the school year.
“[The cabinet members] planned to contact three companies each, either through family or friends of just by emailing and calling the companies directly,” Thompson said. “We emailed Twitter’s company email and our email was forwarded to the WomEng group at Twitter, which emailed me back to sort out logistics.”
The 34 girls who went on the trip took a tour of the Twitter offices, learned more about jobs in the tech industry, and attended a Q&A panel with female Twitter employees.
“My favorite part about the trip was the panel of women,” said sophomore Riddhi Mehta. “[They talked] about their lives at Twitter and the challenges they faced as they became prominent women in tech … The field trip showed me what kind of environment the millennial generations work in, and showed me the baseline of what I can aim for as I go through my high school and college years.”
For SWE Vice President senior Sarena Yang, the experience gave her greater insight in terms of industrial gender demographics.
“I had no idea only 16 percent in the engineering sector [at Twitter] is composed of women,” said SWE Vice President senior Sarena Yang. “I respect these women even more for working hard and never giving up even when they are told they couldn’t do it.”
A Software Engineer at Twitter, working on the Infrastructure Engineering team, Kelsey Blair shares experience on her academic path towards her career at Twitter.
“As a student, you only get to see the academic side of computer science, but the reality of life in the tech industry is far more varied,” Blair said. “The ubiquitous ‘software engineer’ is not the only type of job in the field, and even within that role you can specialize in so many different areas that no two software engineering jobs are ever really identical. Equally important to the learning I did in the classroom was the learning I did on my own, reading books and building simple websites for fun. I did not personally do any tech-related internships in high school or college, but I believe they’re also a good way to get hands-on experience in tech, and to try out different things that interest you in a professional environment.”
Kossiver thinks it is important for women to see themselves in the business situation.
“I think it’s good for students to see what places and where people go to work every day,” said Kossiver, “I think it’s good exposure … I think it’s important for women to see themselves in the business situation and see that they can also compete there.”
SWE was founded in 2016 when Thompson and her friends noticed that there were girls at Aragon who were interested in programming in engineering, yet they weren’t joining Programming Club which consists of one girl member of the 20 total members or robotics with six girls out of the club’s 45 members.
The focus of Aragon’s SWE does not revolve around solving algorithm, instead they mainly work on projects such as developing an app or a website.
“We’ve learned the basics of a few different programming and markup languages, including Python, HTML, CSS, and now JavaScript,” Thompson said. “We also focus on the Technovation competition, in which teams of girls create a app and a business plan that addresses a problem in their community or the world. Last year, our team created an app that helped people transition to a more environmentally friendly lifestyle, and [we] pitched it at our regional Technovation competition.”
SWE currently has 15 to 20 clubs members and looks to continue next year with a stronger curriculum and more field trips.
