As we wrap up our time in the Cockrell School, today’s reflection is on some of the programs for current engineering students that we’ve created and grown.

WEP Living Learning Community
Let’s start with our Learning Community. Ours was one of the first learning communities on campus, launching in 2003 with 12 students. When Ana joined WEP in 2006, the program grew to 28 students. Now we have a whole wing with 76 students. Ana has supported 930 first-year engineering women in our Learning Community since 2006 (out of the 973 total who have participated in the program. Retention of these students has always been off the charts!

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Women in the Second Year of Engineering (WISE)
This program may have our favorite logo – we love the WISE owl. As our programming for second-year students expanded, so did retention and graduation rates.

Peer Assistance Leaders (PALs)
While the PAL program was underway when I joined WEP in 2001, it has grown from 8 PALs in 2002-2003 to a huge peer mentoring program with 162 PALs this year supporting all first-year engineering women throughout their first year in college. We’ve had 1264 amazing PALs since 2002, volunteering their time to help first-year students successfully transition into college and engineering.

We also created WEP Events, a weekly e-newsletter sent throughout the fall and spring semesters. We’ve sent 556 WEP Events (undergrad editions, grad editions, special editions)…that’s a LOT of newsletters!!

Some other programs or initiatives we created, piloted, and/or launched that were adopted by the Cockrell School to lead for the benefit of all students include:

• Cockrell School Student Leaders Conference (thanks to WEP’s first program coordinator Carrie who saw the need to collaborate across Cockrell School programs to offer this to student leaders starting in 2004!!)
• Spatial Visualization Testing / Seminar (Ana helped bring this into WEP in 2010, tested it with our engineering women, and helped make the case for the Cockrell School to offer this to all students in need of a boost in their skills which are proven to boost retention and graduation rates.)
• Connections Classes (In collaboration with Dr. Kerry Kinney, WEP created the Connections Class where cookies are delivered to first or second year engineering courses and faculty spend at least 20 minutes sharing information about themselves, their research, their interests, how they decided to be professor, etc. The Connections Class concept was piloted in Spring 2011 with one second year civil engineering courses. Connections Classes were expanded to all first or second year engineering courses in Spring 2012 and has been offered each fall and spring semester. The Cockrell School funded the program and management of the program was transitioned to Engineering Student Services from WEP beginning Fall 2015.)
• Engineering Ambassadors (WEP was invited to participate inthe Engineering Ambassador National Workshop at Penn State in August 2012. The 2012-2013 academic year was used to plan WEP’s launch of an Engineering Ambassador pilot program based on National Engineering Ambassador Network programming and existing WEP outreach and role model training. Additional programs joined WEP in 2015 to lead the program and it was taken over by Engineering Student Services in 2021 to continue for the Cockrell School.)

Ana and I are super excited to create in this new space and to scale programming like our Living Learning Community to serve more women in STEM across campus.

Tomorrow…we reflect on precollege programs!