My Experience at the SWE Region E Conference!

The Society of Women Engineers, or SWE for short, is an organization designed to provide a community and support to women engineers. They have nearly 30,000 members worldwide, and they host regional conferences in addition to one huge national conference featuring workshops and a career fair to provide opportunities to collegiate engineers and professional engineers within the organization.

This Saturday, I had the opportunity to go to the Society of Women Engineers Region E conference in Syracuse, NY with my school's chapter of the club. It was my first time ever attending a professional conference, and it was such a great experience!

On Being Busy and Loving Every Minute of It

"That's your schedule?" Whenever I pull up my Google calendar in class, that reaction is fairly common - my calendar is filled to the brim with color-coded blocks for every class, meeting, and practice I have. This school year I have undoubtedly been the busiest I have been in my whole life, but looking at my schedule draws a different reaction from me. When I look at my calendar, I'm always filled with a sense of purpose and happiness, even if I know it means a stressful day ahead. Call me weird or whatever, but I really just enjoy being busy.

How to Prepare for Your Interview (and Score that Internship!)

Now that you've met your potential employer at the Career Fair (*cough* after reading my Rock Your College Career Fair guide *cough*), you might just have an interview set up for the position! Interviews are equal parts terrifying and exciting - the idea of having this career opportunity rely solely on the way you carry yourself through an hour of questioning is not something to take lightheartedly, but the potential to score your dream job makes it totally worth it.

I don't know about you, but to me the worst feeling in the world is being unprepared! Lack of preparation can cause me to feel super stressed and nervous, causing me to never perform to my best ability, whether it is in an exam, a dance performance, or an interview. So much depends on an interview, and I have found that preparing both physically and mentally for my interviews has been essential in taking some of the nerves away, and leaving me with the best version of myself to present to my interviewer. Here are some tips I've picked up along the way that will hopefully help you prepare to be the best interview-ee in the game!

#STEMBabes: Meet Olivia Hadlaw, Electrical Engineering Major

Hello everyone, and welcome to the first post in the #STEMBabes series. 

(If you haven't read my introductory post to this series, please click over and read it now!)

Each month, I will be featuring a woman doing cool things in her own STEM-related field in the hopes that they will be able to answer any questions you might have about navigating the world of science, technology, mathematics, and engineering as a female. There are so many girls succeeding and truly making a difference in their respective industries, and I hope getting to know some of them better will help/inspire/motivate girls out there who are getting ready to embark on a similar path. 

This month I've asked my dear friend and roommate, Olivia Hadlaw (Class of 2019), to answer a few questions about her life and experiences as an Electrical Engineering major. I hope you enjoy!

1 Month of Blogging: Thoughts & Changes

I honestly can't believe it has been over a month since I started Yours Truly, Katrina - it feels like it was just yesterday I clicked "Publish" for the very first time. Since then, I've learned so much in a short period of time, and I'm also going to be making some tiny little changes within the next few days!

A Reflection on My First Internship: 5 Things I Learned

This past September, I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to be selected for one of two research intern spots! It would be my first-ever internship, and I was as nervous as nervous gets. I had so many questions & worries:

How will I manage my time? 

What will my co-workers be like? 

Can I handle all of this work? 

Will I enjoy what I am doing?

Now, five months after employment, I can truthfully say that taking the internship was the best decision I've made thus far in my college career. Although there were times I encountered some difficulties, the benefits far outnumbered the costs, and I feel that the experience empowered me to really dive headfirst into getting ready for my "real-world" career. Beyond learning how to conduct research and improve my writing skills, I've learned so many things about my field of study and internships in general. While I know it sounds cliché, I truly feel that the lessons I learned throughout my first internship experience will carry with me throughout my professional career. Here are just a few of the tidbits of information I've gathered over the past five months:

Rock Your College Career Fair - Do's, Don'ts, and How to Prepare

Job hunting season is upon us! Whether you are looking for a full time job, an internship, or to develop a network of recruiters, career fairs are a great way to get in touch with employers and shop around for your perfect job. To me, though, navigating a career fair can seem like searching for a needle in a haystack: it's overwhelming to have to visit hundreds of tables and talk to representatives in search of the opportunity of your dreams.

Going to my first career fair was super intimidating, but after a lot of research I was able to walk into the fair with (relative) confidence and excitement. Through the career fair, I was lucky enough to land an internship with the company of my dreams for this upcoming summer! Here are a few tips and tricks I picked up in my research and from my own experience, and hopefully they will help you make this your best career fair yet.

#STEMBabes: An Introduction

When getting ready for college, most people scour the internet for tips and advice for the next chapter of their lives, from college packing lists to how to deal with your first meeting with a professor. While all of these tips were wonderful to find (and SO many college bloggers are making amazing content specifically for this reason), many of the questions I had during the summer before my freshman year went unanswered.

As a girl majoring in Biomedical Engineering, I had so many questions, and my Google & Pinterest searches came to nothing.

Questions like:

How do I get a research position at college?

How do I study for a calculus exam?

Will there be other girls in my classes? How do I make friends?

What internships am I eligible for?

What's a technical interview? 

What do other girls in engineering do for fun? How do they balance everything?

When I started this blog, I felt a kind of duty to answer these questions for everyone who is searching in the same way I was, now that I've gained experience and a better understanding of what college is really like. Thus, #STEMBabes was born.