SWE and Women at Altera
I am Sangeeta Raste, working at Altera for 13 years. I work as High Speed Transceiver PHY IP Developer Staff Engineer in R&D organization and I’ve lead many hardware and software projects. As a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) design engineer – FPGA is a device with programmability. I write PHY level IPs in Veilog, VHDL, build logic designs, build silicon, bring up hardware and work with different FPGA Boards; being at Altera I get to work on the cutting edge technology. I always enjoy my work and try to find innovative ways to make it more interesting.
Now let me tell you little about the work I am doing at Altera’s Employee Resource Group (ERG): Women at Altera (W@A) –
Recently, I started taking active participation in Women at Altera; I am one of the core team members of Women at Altera and look after the community outreach group where we try to reach out the community through different types of community/volunteering events which includes many of the SWE organized events. This year I am very fortunate to attend the few SWE events like – Wow! That’s Engineering and GetSET.
On Saturday March 14th 2015, I volunteered at Wow! That’s Engineering event at San Jose State University. This event was for High School girls, to introduce/promote girls in engineering. As a representative of W@A, I volunteered in their “Circuits” workshop, got a chance to teach and talk with high school girls. We helped girls to understand the basics of electronics, like resistors, capacitors, transistors and how to make a circuit (on breadboard) out of these components.
The idea was to introduce them to circuits and motivate them. It was fun event, very interesting to see so many high schools girls. I got to talk with many different girls, felt good when I was able to convince few of them that engineering is an interesting field and how these events can help them to understand more about engineering and how it is important for them to attend these type of events. I really felt great to be part of this community event, I worked with many inspired women volunteers and got connected with them. Jeannie David is one of the main organizers of this event and I really got surprised with her energy and community work. At this event I got connected with SWE and other volunteers and came to know about the GetSET event.
Also as a part of W@A I participated in a Stanford SWE event on May 20, 2015. The audience were Stanford students in SWE. As a part of this program we organized a leadership talk by one of the Altera women Managers. In question and answer session, we discussed FPGAs and the opportunities for them in this field and at Altera.
The next community outreach event I attended was GetSET in Santa Clara University (June 22-26, 2015). I lead/organized this event as a part of W@A; five women from Altera volunteered for this event. GetSet is a Silicon Valley summer camp for high school girls exploring careers in STEM. The camp hosted girls from ethnic groups underrepresented in the field of engineering. This camp encourged them to attend college and explore myriad engineering career choices.
This version of GetSET was a project organized through the Society of Women Engineers (SWE) Santa Clara Valley Chapter, of which Altera is a key member. Several W@A members volunteered during the sessions. This meant having a little fun with Legos, marbles, and soldering irons!
-Sangeeta Raste
Find Sangeeta on Twitter @sralt
Special Mentions and Thanks:
Tara Clark, W@A Leader
Diana Wu, SWE Representative within W@A
W@A Core Team, for their great work and support!
