Meet SWE Section, Old Dominion University (ODU). Located in Region E. Today in this post, we arehighlighting the section’s Mentoring Programs, which are great initiatives.Here are the descriptions, straight from the Section …
Mentoring Programs
Officer Shadow Program
Last winter, the ODU section of the Society of Women Engineers launched our first Officer Shadowing program. Our executive board decided to take on four _ÑÒofficer shadows_Ñ in order to expose young, eager members to what each officer position entails, the all-encompassing process of event planning, and to train them on the standard operating procedures of our section. The program is designed to be a personalized and interactive experience for the shadows.Many meetings and workshops throughout the year are dedicated to ensuring the shadows_Ñé careers and academic success, as well as demonstrating the importance of teamwork, organization and communication within an executive board. Each shadow receives an individual rÕ©sumÕ© review and performance assessments on their projects. In conjunction with this personal development, each shadow gains an entire group of mentors which offered a large pool of professional, academic, and personal experiences to draw from. Using this information, experienced officers are able to assign or tailor projects to develop the shadow_Ñés skills in a professional manner.
Giga/Milli Program
In addition to the Officer Shadow program, we launched our first Giga/Milli program. This program serves as a mentoring program open to all of our members where the mentors arereferredto as Gigas and the mentees are Millis.The Giga/Milli pairings were made based on the primary goal of the applicant whether it was personal, academic, SWEinvolvement, orprofessional.The program included many events thatencouraged mentor/mentee relationships on a personal and professional level.
Freshman Leaders in Engineering (FLiE)
Due to the success of the Officer Shadow and Giga/Milli Programs we decided to launch a program geared specifically to developing leadership skills of freshman this year. This program will allow 10-15 freshman from various disciplines and backgrounds take the lead role in planning an event along with having the opportunity to attend seminars and workshops sponsored and hosted by various engineering and leaderships organizations across campus. Although we have taken on the responsibility of launching this program, it is mainly to promote the engagement and leadership development of freshmen that will go on to being involved in all different engineering organizations, not just SWE. We hope that this way SWE can be the reason for a sustainable, positive impact in the engineering college as a whole with stronger engineering organizations which will lead to a more active engineering student body.
Want to catch up on SWE ODU’sevents and other happenings? Check back to their social medias, soon – SWE ODU’s website is currently under construction, but will be LIVE at olddominionswe.wix.com/oduswe.
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