EECS students find inspiration and camaraderie at conference for women

At most research conferences she goes to, EECS Ph.D. student Hayley Iben is one of seven women among 100 computer scientists attending. But at the Grace Murray Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, she finds fellowship with hundreds of other women just like her. The goal of the 1,300-person conference is to spotlight the accomplishments and careers of women in computing and to bring them together for four days of sessions, research presentations and networking.

Seventeen Berkeley women attended the conference this year, which took place October 4–7 in San Diego. The attendees, who took in sessions from mentoring to becoming a CEO (moderated by Dean Newton), were EECS graduate students, Iben, Elaine Cheong, Barbara Engelhardt, Bonnie Kirkpatrick, Anupama Bowander, Zhe Daisy Wang, Juliet Holwill, Sarah Bergbreiter, Sharena Paripatyadar, Maryam Vareth, Samantha Riesenfeld, Cindy Song and Amy Wu, and undergraduates Cho Mon Kyaw, June Andrews, Maryam Shahbazi and Meg Viswanath. [FULL STORY]

Passionate about zero emissions, Berkeley undergrads start electric car project

In the recent documentary “Who Killed the Electric Car?”, filmmakers suggest that G.M.’s EV1 (electric vehicle 1) was sent to an early grave by U.S. auto manufacturers and oil companies, despite California’s program to mandate sales of electric cars beginning in 1998. Whatever the reason, electric cars disappeared in favor of current hybrid technologies.

But after seeing the whodunit movie this fall, ChemE juniors Noah Grant and Arpen Shah are convinced that electric cars represent the future of all vehicles, not hybrids. And, as a leading innovator of future technologies, Berkeley Engineering needs to plug in. Earlier this month, the two started a group, sponsored by MSE professor Ron Gronsky, to design and build an electric car. [FULL STORY]

More 2005 graduates are working than choosing graduate school, survey finds

What is Berkeley’s Class of 2005 doing now? One way to find out is to browse through the baccalaureate survey data released this summer by the Career Center. The center concludes that a majority of students in the class chose employment after graduation — 65.3 percent either were employed full time or were still searching six months after graduation. Only 20.9 percent of students matriculated to graduate school. The remaining students were engaged in other endeavors such as self-employment or part-time employment.

In engineering, 312 alumni responded out of 711 in the Class of 2005, a rate of 43.9 percent, one of the highest in the survey. Here are some interesting tidbits: [FULL STORY]

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