-: Welcome everyone.
Our session is on Women in Science and Technology,
the Power of Mentorship and Female STEM Students.
As mentioned by Eric, please feel free to ask any questions.
We'll be monitoring the chat as we're going back and forth
and we hope to have time at the end.
So to introduce ourselves, my name is Mary-Kate Najarian.
I'm the Director of User Success and Learning Technologies
at Montgomery County Community College.
We're located right outside of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
but my background is actually
in television and radio engineering
and I have a master's in instructional design
and technology and a doctorate in executive leadership.
And my team is the help desk as well
as the technical and instructional designers.
-: Hi, good afternoon.
I'm Mary Beaver.
I'm Director of Enterprise Software Systems
and my background is in accounting.
-: Hello, my name is Sarah Johnson
and I'm an Enterprise Applications Analyst
and my background is actually in marketing
and management information systems.
-: Hi, I'm Jennifer Kim
and my background is actually a psychology.
I have an undergraduate degree in psychology
and I do have a certificate in computer networking.
-: One of the things that we wanted to also acknowledge
is the Innovation of the Year for 2019
went to our team and our initiative.
We had been in the works prior to that,
but this is something that got nationally recognized.
So how did this all come about and why did we start it?
When we looked at the national trends,
we didn't like what we were seeing
for the students that identified themselves as females.
So we realized that in order to make an impact
we had to also start with us at the institution.
So when we looked at the national trend and data,
we saw that there was a concern
for hiring females in this industry.
And we are also saying,
"Okay, let's look at our own institution
"and see where the pipeline is to the careers
"in computer science as well as any other STEM field."
And we, for example, looked at our computer science area
and we saw females enrollment
in the computer science area was down
and it continued to be down over several semesters.
We also noticed that after the students
got out of the initial one or two courses,
the entry courses the persistent rate
for the female students went down as well.
We looked at our trends and said,
okay, we do have almost a 50/50 split
between females and male faculty members,
as well as faculty members that
were full-time faculty members.
They were no longer in the industry
as well as those were still in the industry.
So we realized that this was a need
that we need to get more females into the pipeline.
And once we had them in the pipeline
to keep them in the pipeline.
-: All right.
So, how did we get here?
So based off of both the national numbers
in computer science and the college identified friends,
it clearly pointed to a gap.
So while there was a desire to help fill this gap,
the question was, how?
So, let's start with a little bit of backstory.
Our IT department historically and currently
defies the national end college trends.
We have a VP who has worked
over 50 years at the college in IT,
starting out as a graduate of Montco
with a degree in applied science.
Additionally, our department is approximately 50% of female
who are all career changers that did not start
in the IT field.
Given the career experience
and the supportive nature of our own department,
we have the ability and desire to extend the support
to our students.
-: So when we were looking at our own institution
and how our department was built up,
we realized that there was actually no females
in our infrastructure area.
And one of the things that our VP Celeste said is,
we gotta reevaluate our experience for that pipeline.
So one of the things that we have at our institution
is a giving circle.
It's called Leading Women.
It's a philanthropy group and they created
a paid internship opportunity in this space
where it would help bridge the gap for students to career.
And we were lucky today that,
Jennifer Kim was actually one of our first recipients
and she actually went through that experience.
-: Yeah, so from my own personal experience,
I can really speak to in a test of the fact that
it really is important to bridge that gap
between formal education and workforce,
especially as a non-traditional student
and being a career changer.
There's just a greater need to address the intent
and ability when you're getting to the workforce.
This was, obviously once I was completing
my certificate program this was the exact issue
that I was facing.
How do you prove to potential employers that you have
what they're looking for?
So ideally, the school to career gap is addressed through
an internship where you can apply and demonstrate
your learnt skills and start to build
your interpersonal network.
So having no real work experience myself
in this particular area with my bachelor's
in psychology and work experience following suit,
the timing for the internship opportunity
couldn't have been better.
I applied to the internship.
I was offered and accepted the position,
which turned out to be even better than imagined.
And so with that internship and afterwards,
I was ready to start my career then.
And with some lucky timing, I was actually able to stay
with Montco and have been there for six years now.
So all the while what's the underlying theme?
The underlying theme was mentorship and support.
So let's keep this momentum going.
-: So how did we go from an internship
to the Women in Science and Technology Initiative?
-: So in 2017 I attended EDUCAUSE
and I attended a panel session that consisted
of four female VPs of information technology.
And that panel was asked the question,
what advice do you have for supervisors, managers
and leaders with respect to fostering the development
of women in their careers?
And Sharon Pitt from the University of Delaware
talked about the program that they had at their institution,
which supported women in technology.
So I thought, could we do something like that at Montgomery?
So when I got back to campus I asked, Celeste, our VP,
to see if we could take on this initiative.
And we got her approval and I recruited my colleagues
which consisted of IT administrators and CIS faculty.
Then we actually reached out to other colleges
who had similar groups just to get an idea of how to start.
So after talking with the other schools
who developed similar groups we realized that these schools
chose between two possible paths,
be a group to support and promote current females
already working in tech positions at the college,
or be a support group for students.
And since our current IT department
and our CIS teaching faculty are both approximately
50% female we realized that we already had
a strong internal professional support group.
So we decided at the very beginning that our group
would be a resource to students.
And we knew...
Can you go back to the next, sorry.
So we knew that we wanted to,
for our students,
improve retention in CIS programs
and recruit more students interested in the tech field.
We also wanted to be a mentor to students
and connect them with resources and opportunities.
So how did we go about doing that?
We had to define our mission.
And then we engaged in brainstorming conversations
around the college and then we actually surveyed
our female students.
So this is our mission.
Our mission is to be a resource
to female identifying students at our college
and to encourage retention and completion in STEM fields.
So how did we promote WIST?
We had conversations with everyone across campus.
We had conversations for all the key stakeholders.
We talked to the deans,
we talked to the associate VPs, the VPs,
the advisors, career services, enrollment services,
the STEM coordinators.
We wanted to tell them about our initiative.
We got the approvals from all the VPs
and from our college president,
but we wanted to make it very, very clear
that we were not a replacement to advisors
or to faculty members.
We wanted to make it very clear
that we were another avenue of support,
that we wanted to be mentors to them.
So now that we promoted WIST amongst our colleagues,
we needed to promote WIST amongst our students.
So we then surveyed our female students
and told them about our initiative
and ask them if they would be interested
and then we actually held meet and greets.
-: All right, so we have our idea and we have the approval
now what do we do?
So to initially engage with our students,
as Mary said we decided to send out a survey
to better understand their needs.
So our population consisted
of the female identifying students
that were in technical degree and certificate programs
but we also included a small population
of non-STEM students that were taking one or two CIS courses
to fulfill a tech requirement because we saw that
if they got their feet wet in a technical course
then sometimes at least one of these two courses,
they were likely to change their major to a STEM major.
So we wanted to bring those students in as well
being that the four of us came from
non-technical backgrounds to begin with.
Another initial touch point
was our technology and learning conference
that the college hosts every fall.
So since conferences could be overwhelming
especially since most students haven't attended any of them,
we sent out an email with some specific sessions
that they thought they might be interested in
and then we held a meet and greet afterwards
so that we could discuss their experience.
And we also, the picture that's on this slide,
we made a video introducing ourselves
that was really fun to make
and we thought it was important to create a video
to introduce ourselves instead of just having pictures
because we wanted to make sure that the students saw us
as humans and not just someone behind a computer screen.
So that was really fun.
So through our survey and discussions with the students
we identified multiple challenges
that our students were facing.
And since we're a community college,
our students are all commuters.
We don't have any residence halls.
So students rely on their car or public transportation
to get to the campus.
Additionally, if they're not attending courses
they are working full-time or part-time or raising families
and then when they are attending courses,
it's typically part-time so we really had to find a way
to meet them where they are.
So what we did is we typically held our events
at two different times,
one during the day and one during the evening.
We'd also meet with them one-on-one randomly during the day
'cause some students were only on campus one day a week.
So we wanted to make sure that
we could still meet with them
even if it wasn't always in a group setting.
Another challenge was making sure we covered topics
of interest and benefit to the diverse group of members.
So we usually designed events and topics based on
the feedback from our students.
Okay, so we officially started
the Women in Science and Technology in September of 2019.
So between then and March of 2020
we held multiple in-person meet and greets
where we would provide lunch or a light snack.
We also had one-on-one meetings in the cafeteria
or one of the cafes around campus.
If you're going to try to get students to come
and meet you somewhere, have food, always have food.
It's very enticing.
Even if we got them in the door for 10 minutes.
We at least had enough time to get to know them
and then we'd see them on campus when we'd be walking around
and we would be able to have that
personal exchange with them.
Another way that we would interact with students
is through the advisors.
So if a student was having an issue with a course
or thinking about changing their major
the advisors would reach out to us and do an introduction.
So I would say building a close relationship
with our advisors was very critical
to the success of this program.
And if a student was struggling with a course
typically they tell their advisor
and we would always push them
to first use the institution's tutoring services.
But if they couldn't, then we would reach out
to one of our colleagues in IT
that specialized in those specific skills
and they would actually provide assistance
to those students.
So the tutoring wasn't always as thorough
in the hardware courses so it was nice that
the students could come in
and actually meet with our hardware team
and networking team.
This also brought to light some curriculum barriers
that we were able to address
with the deans and coordinators.
So it was very critical as Mary noted that
we had the approval from our deans and coordinators
and advisors and VPs and everyone was on board
because we really wanted to use all the resources
that the college had to offer
to make sure that these students were successful.
So when we came across curriculum barriers,
for example, if we have multiple students
having the same tutoring issue with the same classes,
then we were able to reach out to the deans and coordinators
to get that addressed.
And also through the tutoring we realized that
students enjoyed the exposure
to different areas of the department.
So we started to offer job shadowing.
For job shadowing,
we recreated a list of the different roles
and their responsibilities in our area
and what we did was we allowed the students to pick
two to three roles that they were interested in
and they spent about an hour or so with each person
learning about what they did.
And then our help desk which reports up to Mary-Kate
is predominantly staffed by students.
So when positions were available,
we would share this out with the students
that are part of the WIST group and so far,
we've actually had three students work for our help desk.
And besides our own positions in promoting our own positions
we would regularly have colleagues from our career services
talk with students about job opportunities, internships
and then hold resume writing courses.
But then in March of 2020 everything stopped,
the administrators and faculty
that volunteer their time to WIST we're all in the trenches
trying to update systems and processes to convert
all of the face-to-face academics and operations to online.
So although we didn't plan any events during this time
we still did talk with our students through email
and address any needs that they had.
And then it wasn't until July
that we had our first virtual meet and greet
and this was more of a checkup.
We asked them, how are they doing?
How're your courses?
How's life?
We really wanted them to know that we were right there
because we were all working from home,
most of us we're working from home with children
so we were all in the chaos together.
And we wanted to let them know that our goal
was to find a way to help them in this new online format,
especially because our institution implemented
so many resources during the pandemic.
I mean, everything that you can make virtual,
we made virtual and then some...
So one of the good things that came out of the pandemic
is that a 100% of conferences were virtual
and we tried to use that
to a benefit to our students
by covering the cost of the 2020 Grace Hopper Celebration.
So we sent about a handful of students to this conference
and they were all really excited.
They got exposure to so many things
and I wouldn't be surprised if some of them
wanted to change their major after the conference
but any exposure we could give them, we tried.
We also sent out details of other conferences
and all those students had to pay their own way
for those conferences if they weren't free.
We wanted to make them aware of what was out there.
And then we also began to offer job shadowing again.
So as we continue to operate remotely,
we started to utilize our new college portal
called Montco Connect which Mary-Kate
is gonna cover in a little bit.
And some of our team members also held panel discussions
during computer science courses.
So that was some nice group interaction
with students where they are able to ask questions
and learn more about tech careers.
And to finish off the spring semester,
we're actually planning to recognize our graduates
this month with some fun Montco swag just to let them know
how proud we are of their accomplishments
and for persisting through to get their degree.
-: So with every new initiative there's always challenges
and we've kind of talked about it throughout the whole thing
but we wanted to make sure we emphasize a few things.
Making sure you create a balance for your student,
you as is, your student population.
Everyone's facing challenges with work, life, schooling,
trying to figure out how everything is working
and where they are going for their career paths.
So through conversations and mentorship,
it's important but also understanding what mentorship is.
It's not telling them what to do,
it's helping them guide through the process.
Getting the students exposure to opportunities.
That also meant that we had to expose ourselves outside
of our normal areas to make sure that
we were providing resources to the students.
We continue to support the different projects
and initiatives at the institution.
So it was important for us to keep this in our forefront
and constantly be reaching out to the students
because the students may or may not
feel that they could reach out.
So by creating that collaborative,
as well as open environment, we were more likely
to maintain them and keep them in the pipeline.
We had more opportunities for strategic outreach
with us being remote we realized that there's
other avenues that we could explore.
So we're gonna use that.
Keep that in mind as we move forward.
And then we also need to keep our programming and resources
that we provide to our students
both for the traditional student if you're
18, 19 year old college student as well as the adults
that are coming back for a second career.
So Sarah mentioned Montco Connect,
Montco Connect is actually our portal.
We launched in July of 2020.
It was scheduled to be July of 2020
and we kept that in place because we felt
it was gonna be important.
The new portal is more of your LinkedIn, Facebook like feel
so when you log into our portal it has a list of activities,
things of announcements that might be of importance.
So any student that has been a part of our WIST group
or will be a part of our WIST group is included into
this community of space that we have for WIST.
And we use that as a central location
'cause we knew that that was gonna be one of our barriers
and we identified it early we just had to
find something to work and this is one of the ways
that we did this.
So we leveraged that Montco Connect portal
to provide the students in one space.
Communication, events, outreach,
any additional things that we might wanna share with them.
And we're proud to say that's also
an Innovation of the Year Award winner for 2020.
So with our barriers and our challenges and where things are
we have increased the ideas of additional speakers,
additional outreach for our students
for the next year and moving on.
We've received feedback from the students continuously
that they appreciate what we've provided to them.
We've given an exposure that
they never knew that they needed.
And as Sarah said, these students are getting ready
to graduate so they have seen that value.
And then we talk about our own struggles with the students
to help them kind of advance through the process.
-: So we thank you for attending our session today
and on the screen is a listing of all of our contacts.
If you are interested in forming a similar group
or if you have a group on campus like this
and you wanna share ideas please reach out to us.
We're more than happy to have a conversation.
And we thank you for your time.