Give Big Pittsburgh - Thank You!
Kim Daloise - WE Local EliTE Award
Upcoming Events
December Event Recap
SWENext Recruitment
SWENext Zoom Event Recap Stem Outreach - Volunteers Needed Join us on Slack!
Job Postings
Welcome New Members
Google Calendar
Other Engineering Activities in Pittsburgh
Amazon Smile!
SWE Pittsburgh FY21 Leadership
SWE LinkedIn
Upcoming Events:
Build-A-Boat Challenge - Volunteers Needed: January 15th - January 28th
Wikipedia Project Info Session: January 26th
PITT SWE's FiERCE Forum: February 6th
Georgena Terry Talk: February 11th
Future City Competition - Volunteers Needed: January - February
Thank You to all those who contributed to
SWE Pittsburgh, on this year’s Giving Day and Beyond!
We have received $685 this year
Through Give Big Pittsburgh
Your support is much appreciated!
Congratulations to Kim Daloise
WE Local New ELiTE Award Winner
Congratulations to Kimberly Daloise who was selected to receive the SWE WE Local 2021 New ELiTE (Emerging Leader in Technology & Engineering) Award!
The WE Local New ELiTE Award honors women with less than 10 years of engineering experience who have demonstrated technical excellence and have strong SWE and community involvement. The application included a formal statement (<2500 words), a professional resume, a SWE resume, and three letters of support (from a work colleague, SWE colleague, and community involvement colleague).
Kim has a B.S. in Bioengineering and a minor in Chemistry from the University of Pittsburgh.
Upon graduation, she began working at Bayer as an Associate Quality Engineer at the Indianola plant. Over the last five years she has taken on assignments of increasing responsibility and is now a Project Quality Assurance Engineer at the Bayer O’Hara plant where she helps to bring in new products for manufacturing.
Kim has been involved with SWE since her freshman year at Pitt. During her senior year, she was Pitt SWE’s Treasurer. After joining our Pittsburgh professional section, Kim served as Treasurer for two years, President for three years, and is currently section Treasurer.
Since the 2021 WE Locals have been postponed until 2022, SWE will celebrate the receipt of the WE Local awards virtually. More details regarding method of recognition will be available later.
Please join me in congratulating Kim!
Upcoming Events
Wikipedia Project Information Session
Big news! Over the next few months, we’ll be starting a project aimed at creating entries and improving the quality of entries on Wikipedia for women in STEM with ties to Pittsburgh! A big thank you to member Debbie Stine for suggesting this project. An information session will be held on Tuesday January 26th at 6:30 PM ET. It will be recorded for those who are unable to attend. If you are interested in this project, the time commitment is flexible. Through the first few months of the spring, we’ll be identifying and researching women who are in need of a new page or an improved page on Wikipedia; then we’ll learn how to make contributions on Wikipedia, write our new suggestions, and publish them. It should be a rewarding and fulfilling way to give back to our community.
Georgena Terry Talk
In the 1980s, Georgena Terry realized that there was a need for bicycle frames built specifically for women and from there she set out on a journey to invent a suitable bicycle frame and start her company, Terry Precision Bicycles for Women. On February 11th, Georgena Terry, who is a CMU graduate, will be giving a professional talk to our section about her experience with design, innovation, and entrepreneurship. Invitations will be sent via evite two weeks in advance. I hope to see you there!
December Events Recap
We started off the month of December with an informal social event! Thanks to all who came out. It was nice getting to chat about a variety of topics. We love seeing new faces at these events, so be sure to check out the next one!
We also hosted a fundraising workshop with a local Pittsburgh artist, Sarah Cohen. We made paper mosaics and we discovered there are some very talented artists amongst us! Pictured below are some creations from Amrutha Ramesh (top left), Jay Iyengar (bottom left), Chuck Bleil (top right) and Mary Zeis (bottom right). Through the event, we raised $70 for our chapter. Thanks to everyone who came for their support.
SWENext recruitment Challenge -
Help us Recruit SWENexters!
SWENext is a free program where girls can become a part of the SWE community before college. SWE provides resources, content, and programming for “SWENexters”, such as scholarship tips, advice on how to prepare for college success, leadership training, awards, mentors, and advice columns. Check out the SWENext website at swenext.swe.org.
SWE’s Student Programs Committee is sponsoring a SWENext Recruitment Challenge. The sections who recruit the most SWENexters by June 1st will win money to be used for STEM Outreach events. Help us recruit SWENexters!
Please reach out to girls you know in Kindergarten through 12th grade who enjoy STEM. Encourage them to sign up for SWENext. It’s free! Please ask them to use Event Code PGHPRO when they sign up so SWE Pittsburgh gets credit for recruiting them. 😊
(FYI, it doesn’t matter where the girl lives. So, if you have nieces or cousins in another state, please recruit them and ask them to use Event Code PGHPRO. We’ll get credit no matter where they live as long as they use the Event Code.)
Questions about the SWENext program? Please reach out to maryzeis@gmail.com.
She is on the society-level Student Programs Committee that is responsible for the SWENext program.
SWENext Zoom EVENT RECAP
SWE Pittsburgh continues our efforts to reach out to students virtually to encourage them to consider engineering as a career and to help them feel a part of the SWE community.
Our latest event for SWENexters was “Follow Your Own Path – A Conversation with a Maverick and Pioneer in the Women’s Bicycle Industry”, held on Thursday, December 3rd.
The “Maverick and Pioneer” was mechanical engineer Georgena Terry. Georgena traded in a career at Xerox for her real passion, designing and building bicycles for women in her own company. At the event, she shared how she carved her own path, what lessons she learned, and gave advice to the high school SWENexters.
We had 10 girls participate. The post-event survey showed all attendees liked the event and all were likely to recommend an event like this to a friend. One attendee wrote: “I appreciated the advice from Ms. Terry for young female engineers: surround yourself with like-minded people, and if you put your mind to it, you can really do anything.”
Thank you to Georgena Terry for being our guest speaker.
STEM Outreach – Need Volunteers
All STEM Outreach events have moved to virtual because of the pandemic. We continue to need volunteers. Thanks!
The SWE Pittsburgh section is currently running this challenge for SWENext members in 5th through 12th grades who live in Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia, or Delaware. The challenge is to build a boat that paddles itself using a rubber band as the power source. Then, the students will submit a short video of the boat paddling in a bathtub.
Prizes will be awarded for the best boats in each grade range (5th-6th, 7th-8th, high school).
We need 4 SWE member volunteers to judge the 2-minute videos that will be submitted. The expected time commitment is one hour. Judging will begin on January 15 and needs to be completed by January 28. A judging rubric will be provided.
If you haven’t participated in STEM Outreach yet this fiscal year, this could be your chance! Please contact us at maryzeis@gmail.com if you can be a judge.
Future City is a project-based engineering education program that challenges middle-school students to imagine, design, and build cities of the future. In Pittsburgh, the event is organized by the Carnegie Science Center.
The 2021 Challenge is “Living on the Moon”: Design a lunar city and describe how it uses two of the Moon’s resources to keep the city’s residents safe and healthy.
SWE Pittsburgh supports Future City by being a Special Award sponsor and by supplying judges. All judging will be virtual this year.
If you are interested in being a judge, you can register via the following link – https://secure.futurecity.org/JudgeBin/Judge/Open/Enroll. For “My Choice of Region”, be sure to select “Pennsylvania (Pittsburgh) Region”. Once that is selected, you will see the volunteer opportunities available.
City Essay judging will be from January 18 – February 3.
Special Awards judging will be from February 8 – 12.
Model Slide Show and Video Presentation judging will be from February 8 – 12.
Live, on-line City Q&A with teams (for model judges to finalize their scores) will be on Saturday, February 13.
Please join me in being a Future City judge this year!
Thanks to Melissa Martinez for giving a presentation on Materials Engineering to a group of 11 high school students at Eden Christian Academy in Sewickley.
Melissa has a B.S. in Materials Science & Engineering from MIT. She also has an M.S. from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She is the Vice President, Product & Process Technology at ATI.
If you’ve presented to K-12 students in the last 6 months, please let us know. We submit information to global SWE on any K-12 STEM Outreach event where a SWE member participated (whether or not it was part of our section’s program). Global SWE has the Outreach Metric Tool to make this easy to do. Since SWE is a non-profit, having data on how many students that SWE members have impacted is helpful when SWE applies for external grants. Thanks!
So far this year, 23 SWE Pittsburgh members have participated in at least one K-12 STEM event. That is fantastic! Thank you!
Have you participated yet? If not, stay tuned for future opportunities!
If you know of a virtual STEM program at a local school that would benefit from having a woman engineer be a part of it, please contact maryzeis@gmail.com with the details.
If you’d like to help out with the SWE Pittsburgh Outreach Committee or learn more, please send an email to maryzeis@gmail.com.
SWE Members: Thanks for all you do to influence and impact the next generation of women engineers!
Join us on Slack!
Want to connect with other Pittsburgh SWE members but not sure how?
Our Pittsburgh SWE chapter has recently created a members-only Slack workspace to keep conversing and connecting outside of traditional events.
This tool will be a resource for engaging with others over shared interests, sharing information with other members, and developing relationships with others in your field and at your career level, but these are only a few examples of the endless possibilities we have with Slack.
For more information on how we plan to use this Slack and information about Slack in general, please see this document. If you have any questions, please email swepittsburgh.programming@gmail.com.
Check out Job Postings in the Newsletter and on the SWE Website
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Are you an Employer looking to post a job? Contact swe.pittsburgh@gmail.com
SWE Membership Updates
SWE has a new database for members – every member should have received an email from SWE headquarters with new login information. Please do create a new profile for yourself and please include your employment, education, and address; also remember to check to opt-in for SWE to send you emails (email is the main method of SWE Pittsburgh communication to our members). We appreciate your patience with the new system. SWE Pittsburgh is also having difficulties and we have been providing feedback to SWE headquarters. As we become aware of changes to our membership roster, we will do our best to keep you, our members, informed.
It’s a New Year and we welcome the following member to our Pittsburgh SWE Section:
Quintessa Guengerich | Professional member New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology BS Chemical Engineering 2019 and Robotics Institute Carnegie Mellon University 2019, employed as Hardware Robotics Engineer at Argo AI
Rebecca Rugh | Professional member, Penn State University BS Materials Engineering 2014, employed at Westmoreland Mechanical Testing and Research
Sydney Sandidge | Professional member, Ohio State University, Biological Engineer, employed at Bayer
Abigail (Abbey) Schmoll | Professional member (prior member of Chicago Regional SWE Section), Iowa State University, BS ME 2006, employed with Solvay Inc.
Mary Jo Serrino | Professional member, Chatham College, Software Engineer Principal at Zebra Technologies
Victoria Webster-Wood | Professional member, Case Western Reserve University, PhD Mechanical Engineering 2017, employed as Assistant Professor at Carnegie Mellon University
Renewed membership with Pittsburgh SWE Section:
Thank you to Sonya A. Hanczar for renewing her membership. Sonya has been a member of the Pittsburgh section since 1974.
Leaving Pittsburgh Section:
Nicole Gallegor | Professional member. Penn State University, BS Mechanical Engineering 2017, employed as Process Engineer at Rockwell Automation. Nicole will be completing her next assignment in Ohio and is transferring to the Northeast Ohio (NEOH) SWE Section in the Cleveland/Akron area.
Starting January 2021, SWE Pittsburgh has 147 members.
We’re glad you’ve joined us. We look forward to seeing you via our virtual events.
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Other Interesting Engineering Activities in Pittsburgh
The Engineers Society of Western Pennsylvania (ESWP) keeps an up-to-date events list for people interested in learning more about the Steel city and engineering throughout the area.
Please visit their website at: https://eswp.com/events/
If you know of interesting engineering events, please let us know and we will publicize it!
Amazon Smile!
Did you know that by simply shopping on smile.amazon.com and selecting Society of Women Engineers as your supported charity, Amazon will donate 0.5% of eligible purchases to our Section? How awesome is that!
If you want to put your Amazon shopping to good use, follow these steps:
Step 2: Select Choose your charity -OR- change the charity your supporting
Step 3: Search for Society of Women Engineers
Step 4: Search for the Pittsburgh, PA Location
Step 5: Shop shop shop! Well, remember to shop at Smile.amazon.com!
SWE Pittsburgh FY21 Leadership
President: Ashley Zulueta
Vice President-Programming: Elizabeth Foster
Vice President-STEM Outreach and Data Officer: Mary Zeis
Secretary: Jackie Walsh
Treasurer: Kim Daloise
Membership Chair: Mary Ann Walsh
Webmaster: Reneicia Frazier
Newsletter Editor: Cassandra Solarczyk
Job Bank Coordinator: Dorothy Measures
Social Media Chair: Katie Gates
Fundraising Chair: Jay Iyengar and Meaghan Shea
Outreach Co-Chair: Deepika Devarajan and Rachel Upadhyay
Collegiate Section Liaison: Laura Traczynski
Nominating Committtee: Dorothy Measures, Meaghan Shea, Mary Ann Walsh
Look for us on the SWE Pittsburgh website and contact any of us by sending an email to swe.pittsburgh@gmail.com
Would you like to sponsor SWE Pittsburgh?
If you would like your company to be a local sponsor, contact SWEPittsburgh@gmail.com
Our Pittsburgh SWE Section has a LinkedIn group. Search for it in LinkedIn groups under “Pittsburgh SWE Section – Society of Women Engineers”. Then, request to join the group.
This is a closed group that will only be open to our section’s members.
Why join? You’ll have direct access to other Pittsburgh SWE members where you can:
- Ask for career advice
- Ask for work life balance advice
- Find a mentor
- Share your successes!
