SWE Impact Recognized

Society of Women Engineers honored with two awards at conference

Santa Clara’s Society of Women Engineers (SWE) traveled to the Women Engineers local conference in San Diego on Feb. 1 to receive the Guiding Star Award and Outstanding Outreach Event Award for being an incredibly impactful program.

Last spring quarter, seniors Mariah Manzano and Story DeWeese created and led one of SWE’s two largest programs, SWE++, which was awarded the Outstanding Outreach Event Award last December. 

The event is a nine week coding program that brings local middle school girls to Santa Clara and teaches them how to code in languages such as Scratch and Python. 

Their goal is to not only teach the girls coding skills, but also to empower them and reduce the gender gap in STEM.

SWE++’s number of participants has doubled since last year with a full lab of 27 students for this quarter. 

Last weekend, the SWE++ committee accepted the same award for continuing to be an impactful program.

DeWeese, one of the co-chairs along with Leila Scola, is grateful for the recognition SWE++ has received following their hard work to set up the program. 

“I am happy to see the growth of SWE++ and how it is continuing to not only help middle school girls,” DeWeese said. “but also help the college students...making sure that they are solid in the foundation of their coding skills.”

The second award was given to Manzano, the SWE President, for her work as a collegiate leader with SWE, Santa Clara and her local community. 

“I am extremely proud of our section for receiving two well-deserved awards,” Manzano said. “The [Santa Clara] SWE board works tirelessly to help the club reach its fullest potential and to accurately represent the mission of SWE, which is to empower women and girls to achieve their goals, uplift others, and exceed their own expectations.”

The Society of Women Engineers is a Santa Clara registered student organization that hosts a variety of professional development, outreach, mentorship and social events and local and national conferences.A few other programs that SWE provides are the “SWE x STEM Girls Mentorship” and “Day in the Life” programs. The “SWE x STEM Girls Mentorship” program hosts middle school girl mentees interested in pursuing STEM. 

During Girl Day of eWeek later this month, the girls will visit Santa Clara for shadowing and a tour of campus. 

Their “Day in the Life” event will showcase to around 60 high school girls what a day for a female Santa Clara engineer student looks like. 

Contact Nisha Shankar at nshankar@scu.edu or call (408) 554-4852.