During the last year of my PhD at Berkeley, I founded the annual Berkeley Stanford Research Meetup for Graduate Women Engineers. The idea for this event came from going to too many women’s conferences where all they talk about are topics such as “how to negotiate your salary” or “how to have a balanced life”. I thought it was a shame that organizations would bring together so many talented female engineers and not talk about engineering at all.
Since Berkeley and Stanford are so close together geographically, I thought it would actually be quite easy to organize a joint Berkeley-Stanford event. I was fortunate to work with Te-Yuan Huang at Stanford to make all of it happen. The event was for both graduate and undergraduate women. Several women from both schools presented their research in short 10min talks. The goal of the event was really two-fold. First, to encourage undergraduate women to participate in CS/EE research. Second, to provide a platform for grad women in Berkeley and Stanford to have more interaction with each other.
Since then, the event has taken place annually. It was attended by roughly 60 women each year and we were fortunate to even have women faculty join our event. Here are the event sites for 2013 and 2014.