Society of Women Engineers Region J Blog

Your SWE membership has much more to offer than you probably know about.  This Hot Topic will help you know what resources are out there to aid in your section, and even you and your career.

The resources have been broken up into two sections, human resources and internet resources.

Human Resources – These people can help you personally

1. Faculty Adviser – This person can help you in numerous ways. They will generally help you with more administrative things at your college, but they can also help by being a mentor, or helping you with school-related bureaucracy. My faculty advisor in my section also helps by telling us when things are professional versus unprofessional because she has a somewhat outsider and more mature look at the situation.
2. SWE Counselor – This counselor is a professional SWE member in your geographic location. This person can help with SWE-related issues such as updating bylaws, and can also be a mentor. This person is an excellent resource for career related assistance.
3. Engineering Adviser – Not every section has an engineering advisor. At my school, we have a collection of minority engineering student groups (AISES, NSBE, SHPE, SWE) that are grouped into one cohesive family. This helps the student organizations because if a company wants to visit some minority student groups, they can visit all at once and save the time and effort. We have an advisor over this group who helps us schedule activities and gives a lot of helpful information about how student organizations are run.
4. College of Engineering Dean – This person is the head of the College of Engineering and can help with financial and other assistance. They could help you fund your travel to Nationals or other specific event that represents the College of Engineering in good light. Most of the time the Dean will have money set aside to help out student organizations. The relationship with your Dean will also come in hand when you need some help organizing events in your section.
5. Student Government – Usually the student government has some money to help out student organizations. They can help subsidize particular programs, such an outreach event, guest speaker, or national conference travel. They also help you advertise your event.
6. Region Collegiate Representative (RCR) – RCR’s are responsible for representing the collegiate at a regional and national level. They are the person to go to if you are having problems with your section, advice on how to hold an event, and how to fill out your section, annual reports, and the annual financial reports. You can contact Heather via email at (rcr-j@swe.org).
7. Region Collegiate Newsletter Editor (RCNE) – Even though I don’t represent you at the regional or national level, I do have contact with them. Also, I will be able to connect you through with the right people. I can also post your problem on the blog, where other sections can comment about a similar situation. The opportunities are endless. You can email me at (rcne-j@swe.org) or comment any of the pages on this blog.
8. Other Collegiate Sections – If your section is experiencing a problem, there is definitely another section that has problem had that problem at one time or another. You can also pair up with other sections with events. It allows your members to meet there, and the turn out for the event increases dramatically.
9. Professional Sections – They can help you provide sponsorship, speakers, mentors, career guidance, and the list goes on. They are a valuable resource and will often help out with your events, or you will help out with their events.

Internet Resources – These are very helpful links

1. MySWE Communities – Similar to any form of social networking, SWE Communities provides online interaction tools designed to facilitate discussions and information sharing among members. You are given your own personal SWE profile, and can add yourself to groups called Communities. You can add friends, have a calendar, participate in discussion, help out with document collaboration, hear about events, and make your own blogs, polls, chat, and the list goes on. To register, you will need your SWE user name and password.
2. Collegiate Leadership Coaching Committee (CLCC) – The CLCC gives detailed presentations to collegiate sections on a series of Modules, ranging from Leadership to burnout. They are a great resource to help train your new leadership, to help attract membership, to teach your members about SWE, etc. A list of Modules can be found on the CLCC link.
3. SWE Webinars – You receive emails pretty frequently about new SWE Webinars. These are like short seminars, but on the web (get it, web and seminar = webinar). Anyways, the information given in webinars are fairly similar to the information given during seminars at conferences. They are usually on work balance and other various topics. Here is a list of past webinars and links to the video/audio.
4. SWE Scholarships – SWE gives out a myriad of scholarships every year. During last year, SWE gave out over $400 thousand in scholarships. Application information is available now on the SWE Scholarships link.
5. SWE Outreach – This website has all of the information needed for coordinating outreach activities. It gives more details on well founded SWE outreach activities, such as Wow! That’s engineering, and other events.
6. SWE National Conference Toolkit – This is a really nice tool kit to use when you need help increasing your section’s attendance at the SWE National Conference by providing fundraising ideas, a fundraising timeline, letters for the Dean, Sponsorship request letter templates, and ideas for cost cutting measures.

P.S. This was from last year’s RCNE. I thought it was so amazing that I shouldn’t write a new one. Thanks!