I did not realize this until the end of my time at Illinois, but we are all part of something much bigger than our class or committee in SWE Illinois. We can get a glimpse of the SWE that came before us and the SWE that will follow in our first and final years at Illinois, but the individual experience in SWE will be both unique and limited. I am not sure if anyone of us has the most complete picture of what SWE Illinois is.
Amanda Hsu and I have recently been digging around in some of our archives and finding a lot of really interesting information about the history of our section.
This is from our first meeting:
This is Professor Grace Wilson, the founding faculty advisor of our section. This photo was taken from an article in a set of clippings that our section used to maintain about women in engineering.
If you look through the meeting minutes, you might recognize mentions of Little Sister’s Weekend or Mom’s Day Banquet in 1977. It is interesting to think about how the current state of the college of engineering was envisioned by SWE members from the past. On 11/12/1974, there is an entry regarding an SWE’s exhibit for the upcoming Engineering Open House: “It would show that in the year 2001, 50% of the engineers are women. There would be various displays showing what great things women have done in technology up to the year 2001”
It might not be widely known today, but SWE led a diversity initiative in 2010 for the College of Engineering. We released an anonymous survey for undergraduate and graduate women, publishing these results in the SWE conference magazine.
I think that knowing our history is important for any member of SWE. It can be a source of inspiration or pride. We have come a long way as an organization, but there is always potential to do more.
In my small window of four years, I have been blessed to spend time with wonderful, intelligent people in SWE. I hope that this is universal, and that all of us can remember SWE as both a second family and a leader in the Grainger College of Engineering.
As a graduating senior, I am coming to terms with the fact that our archives are limited. We cannot document every moment of our time with the section. Some things will be irretrievably lost, but we can do our best to preserve our experience in photos or chair reports. We don’t know what we don’t know, and in that sense it is hard to draw any conclusions about the importance or magnitude of holes in our history. If we document our section well, we will be able look back at our history and assess progress. That is absolutely necessary. With at most four years of experience with SWE, no one collegiate member can know what we are capable of, but these records can put a lower bound on our potential.
A few pointers: