On May 22, there will be a speaker panel discussion on “Out in Engineering” organized by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers at University of California, Santa Cruz’s Baskin School of Engineering. According to the UC Santa Cruz News Center, students who attend get a chance to interact with industry professionals and learn from strong role models in the tech industry.
“At Baskin Engineering, we’re focused on widening the pipeline into engineering programs and the tech industry for women and other groups that are vastly underrepresented in engineering,” said Dean Alexander Wolf. “We are motivated to increase the number of female engineers, engineers of color, LGBTQ engineers in our classrooms and labs—not only to bring the wonderful opportunities that engineering offers to a wider audience, but also because diverse teams do better work: They design better solutions and they understand problems from more diverse perspectives.”
Part of an effort to get a more diverse population interested in engineering as a field of study and technology as a career, the Baskin School of Engineering sponsored “Diverse Voices,” a professional speaker series that ran through May 8. The line-up of speakers for Diverse Voices included Jacob Martinez, executive director of Digital NEST and Laura Gomez, chief executive officer and founder of Atipica.
Gomez founded Atipica, a tech company that helps businesses build diverse and inclusive workplaces. She was named one of the Frederick Douglass 200, a project to honor the impact of 200 living individuals who best embody the work and spirit of Douglass.
Martinez created Digital NEST to give opportunities in tech to under-represented young people. Digital NEST gives youth from high school to age 24 free access to computers, software, wi-fi, and state-of-the-art digital tools and classes.
“The tech industry has been dominated by white men for years,” he said. “The environment they create in the university setting is not welcoming to people of color and women.”
According to Abigail Kaun, special assistant to the dean, initiatives like Diverse Voices can help students from underrepresented groups understand that they belong in engineering and can have an impact on technology.
Of the 4,374 total undergraduate students in engineering majors in fall 2018, 78 percent self-identify as male and 21 percent as female, which corresponds to the national averages (77 percent men, 22.9 percent women) tracked by the American Society for Engineering Education.
The Graduation Celebration for the Jack Baskin School of Engineering Class of 2019 will be held at 4:00 pm, Friday, June 14, 2019, on the East Field.
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