A conference's impact on undergraduate female students

ABSTRACT

In September of 2000, the 3rd Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing was held in Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Along with a colleague from a nearby university, we accompanied seven of our female undergraduate students to this conference. This paper reports on how the conference experience immediately affected these students --- what impressed them, what scared them, what it clarified for them. It also reports on how the context in which these students currently evaluate their ability, potential and opportunity in computer science is different now from what it was before the conference. Hopefully, by understanding their experience, we can gain some insight into things we can do for all of our undergraduate female students to better support their computer science and engineering education.