Quarterly Meetings with Panels of Faculty from STEM Departments.

Our second aim is for the Partnership of Women in Science and Engineering to organize quarterly meetings.  These meetings will be capped at around 30 combined undergraduate and graduate students.  They will feature three to four tenure-track female faculty and post-doctoral fellows from across the Sciences and Engineering.  Each meeting will be composed of a panel discussion on a specified issue relevant to both graduate and undergraduate students and more informal table discussion where undergraduate and graduate students will have the opportunity to discuss the topic together and with a faculty member. Undergraduate and graduate students will benefit from seeing role models in different stages of the research career track and able to make contacts that can serve as resources in the future. These meetings also offer an opportunity for interdepartmental communications and could lead to collaborations. For the success of this portion of our project, we will need to recruit female faculty members to be on our panel.  We hope that by choosing dates for our events very early and by giving the meetings a clear and easily understood structure that we will be able to find panel participants.

This project should prove to be sustainable because the Partnership of Women in Science and Engineering will provide training for rising leaders and will therefore always have a leadership team of current female undergraduate and graduate students.  The leaders will be in charge of organizing the quarterly meetings and managing the content on the webpage where the video interviews are housed.  These videos can be updated over a period of years to reflect changes in the faculty composition.  The organization will be in charge of removing videos of professors that are no longer at Rice and adding new videos of recently arrived Professors.