GetSET for the next gen of women engineers

Posted August 22nd, 2007 at 9:45 am by Havi Hoffman, Yahoo! Developer Network

 One Comment / Filed in: Behind the Scenes

Yahoo! Women in Tech, an internal stakeholder group for women across Yahoo!’s technology organization, recently partnered with the Society of Women Engineers to host this year’s GetSET Industry Tour Day. Seventy-two teenage girls from high schools all over Santa Clara County (Calif.) spent the day at Yahoo!’s Sunnyvale campus for a taste of life and work at Yahoo! HQ.

“Engineering is the way to go!”

GetSET (the SET is for Science, Engineering, and Technology) is an outreach program sponsored by the Santa Clara Valley section of the Society of Women Engineers. This four-year mentoring program serves high-school girls from communities and groups typically under-represented in engineering and computer science — encouraging participants to finish high school, apply for college, and explore careers in math, science, and technology, where there is a growing demand for skilled employees, and a declining trend in numbers of women and minorities who are entering these fields.

“It’s hard work but fun at the same time.”

The day was packed with activities, beginning with a welcome from Mercedes DeLuca, Yahoo! VP of Global IT, and a panel discussion about what it’s like to work at Yahoo!. The girls divided into smaller groups for a campus tour that included a variety of Yahoo! landmarks. Our guests checked email at the purple cow, played foosball, posed at the fountain, window-shopped the Yahoo! Company Store, got in front of the blue screen at Yahoo! Studios, and video-conferenced with our Burbank office.

“I want to work here now!”

After a lunch break, the teams participated in a web design workshop. Yahoo! volunteers (guys, too) stood by as small teams, many of whom had never met before, shared laptops and built web pages inspired by their visit. Quite a few of the girls knew how to create and personalize their MySpace pages, while some were familiar with HTML, and others knew a bit of JavaScript. Some of us non-engineers learned that Ctrl-C (copy) and Ctrl-V (paste) go a long way towards implementing a mashup and adding it to a web page, while other teams were fortunate to have Yahoo! hackers, coders and designers standing by to assist.

“In all jobs, you have to work as a group.”

At the close of the day, several teams stepped up to the front of the classroom to present their pages — Hack Day-style. Their energy, enthusiasm, and sense of fun were contagious. We sent the GetSET girls home with gift bags of purple schwag and plenty of good memories.

Havi Hoffman
Influencer Marketing

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One Comment Add your own

Linda Sorauf | September 2nd, 2007 at 2:29 pm

I was priviledged to talk to some of the GetSET girls several days after their Yahoo! visit and they were still excited and enthused about it. It opened a whole new world to them. I think the trip really heled them to set their future goals and they will now always blend the ideal of a workplace with the image of a purple cow! Mooo!