Introducing Stories From Our First Student Chapter Buddies!
ACM-W has started a new campaign. The aim of this campaign is to encourage all ACM-W chapters to partner with other ACM-W chapters to become a Buddy for collaborative works. As ACM-W Europe, we announced the new campaign of ACM-W with our chapters, and we are so proud to share that we have one student chapter buddy and one professional chapter buddy already. This month we would like to share with your our student chapter buddies. ATU ACM-W Student Chapter which is at Atlantic Technological University, Ireland, and ACM Bilkent, which is at Bilkent University, Turkey became our first student chapter buddies!
The ATU ACM-W Student Chapter is a chapter run by students at Atlantic Technological University, Letterkenny, Ireland. The chapter fulfills the ACM-W mission in supporting, celebrating, and advocating for Women in Computing. We do this by running events or supporting our members to apply for scholarships, grants and attending events. The ATU ACM-W Student Chapter was founded in 2014 and has gone from strength to strength as we look forward to their 10th anniversary.
ACM Bilkent started its journey as an ACM-W Student chapter called BILWIC (Bilkent University Women in Computing)in 2004. BILWIC, “Bilkent University ACM-W Student Chapter,” has the first international ACM-W identity. BILWIC, which has both national and international identity, is the first ACM-W Student Chapter in Turkey, with 181 and more other students. To reach out to more students, the chapter switched to ACM Student Chapter in 2019. ACM Bilkent is organizing talks, workshops, and social activities to bring together various intellectuals while easing access to a wide variety of resources and ultimately acting as a collective voice for its members and chapters.
Our first students’ buddies will collaborate on ACM Celebration of Women in Computing: Bean Feasa (wise woman), which will be co-located with the Cyber Research Conference Ireland (Cyber-RCI), which will provide an opportunity to meet with researchers and industry alike. The bean feasa can choose a path in computing, engineering and related fields with the support of the university. This event will include guest speakers and a panel on career pathways. The 1st celebration occurred in 2017 with Dr Toni Collis as our keynote speaking about high performance computing. In 2018 we were delighted to have a number of workshops from industry with representatives from Microsoft, Pramerica and Klarna. As ACM-W Europe, we are proud to sponsor two members from ACM-W Bilkent to join the ACM Celebration of Women in Computing: Bean Feasa event physically. We hope to see more collaboration soon!
Thank you to our ACM-W Europe Chair, Dr Rukiye Altin, for providing us with the information in this post!