Blog Spot November18
With Her: A Skilled Girl Force
Did you know that October 11 is marked as the International Day of the Girl! It is a day where we highlight and address the needs and challenges that girls face, while promoting girls’ empowerment and the fulfillment of their human rights.
At IEEE SCV WIE branch, we standby the global community in observing this day. Under this year’s theme, “With Her: A Skilled Girl Force”, International Day of the Girl (IDG) marks the beginning of an effort by us to draw attention to the Bay Area young women to the most pressing needs and opportunities for girls to attain skills for employability. We collaborated with Oracle this year to bring together the IDG2018 for our aspiring young students across three middle schools: Buchser Middle School, Renaissance Academy at Fischer and the Renaissance Academy at Mathson.
The event was led by our officer, Jeewika Ranaweera from Oracle who opened the event with an inspiring speech. She also coined an innovative term STEAM4MD (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art and Math for Making a Difference) in her talk. This was followed by a talk on “A Skilled Girl Force” by the Senior Vice President of Oracle, Sridhar Vajapay. All girls were enthusiastic and were hard to stop asking questions at the end of each talk.
The event had many hands-on activities. While the Tech Museum San Jose taught how to organize a Cup Cake Delivery and learn the steps needed from product conception to production, to marketing and deployment. Art in Action built with the girls Wish Trees colorful, joyful and inspirational.
After a brief lunch break the girls had the opportunity to get an introduction to the Design_Code_Build course offered by the Computer History Museum. The closing session was a panel brought by a group of inspiring women from Oracle. Each of them presented their story and how they got involved in STEM. The story of their journey and how they managed the various obstacle and challenges reflected once more that passion and perseverance are key factor to follow the profession of choice. The girls asked a lot of questions also about life outside Oracle, and the panelists answered all questions with enthusiasm.
A strong group of 120 girls, teachers and chaperones across the three middle schools attended this event. They got many learning opportunities during this entire event and also interacted with the inspiring Oracle women. The IEEE SCV WIE branch was happy to see the success of this event and hopes to continue offering such learning opportunities to many more students.
The IEEE SCV WIE branch stands with all the girls and supports them as they take their place as the leaders, responders and innovators of the future.