Curry College Hosts Comput/her for Local High School Students

Last month, around 30 female high school students spent a day on the Curry College campus for Comput/her, a conference for young women to explore career opportunities in computing and data science. Participants heard inspirational stories from successful women in the field, attended workshops run by female college students and recent graduates, and participated in collaborative, hands-on, skill-building activities.

Two professionals representing the event’s partners spoke at the event, including keynote speaker Christine Kelliher ’17, who is a senior engineer at Wayfair, and Yari Ising, Engagement Director at Kessel Run.

Curry faculty Dr. Jennifer McNally, Dr. Ronald Krawitz, and Dr. Alison Poor-Donahue planned and organized the successful event, which was described by McNally as a “great day.” Alumna Brittany Soares ’21, a software engineer at Citizens Bank, led a workshop on how to use one’s college experience to lead to a successful career, while Accursia Carbo ‘20, a technology service analyst at UMass Lowell, led a workshop where she showed the students how to program a robot.

A popular event of the day was the Rocket Challenge, run by Curry junior Caroline McDonald, a math education major. In this session, the students celebrated the work of important women in computing history with a fun rocket design and flight competition.