College of Engineering

Transcript

Next, let’s head over to this high tech machine shop on campus, here, you’ll meet twins, Vanessa and Victoria. They’re juniors, both majoring in electrical engineering. And if that somehow surprising you, just wait. They’re also working at welcoming a more diverse peer group to their field. Vanessa and Victoria, the tour is all yours.

– [Ladies] Thanks Alex.

– We are first-generation college students from Panorama city, California.

– We’ve always enjoyed learning about math and science, but our interest in electrical engineering sparkled when we took a robotics class in middle school.

– We began taking the same classes, studying together and even helping each other understand concepts. That continues today since we chose the same major. So I guess you can say we have permanent study buddies. Being Hispanic women in a male dominated field, we didn’t know what to expect in regards to rigor, diversity and support in a college environment. Since freshman year, we struggled to feel connected to our engineering community and at times we felt like we didn’t belong. These are common emotions among minorities in fields where diversity hasn’t always existed. There weren’t many women in electrical engineering and there were even fewer Latinas in our classes. So spring quarter of our freshman year, we decided to step out of our comfort zone and become more involved in the College of Engineering. We both started joining organizations that promoted diversity, and that would benefit us in our field of study, such as the Society of Women Engineers, Chicanx and Latinx Engineers and Scientist Society and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. These organizations were great for professional development and inclusiveness, but we felt like women in electrical engineering needed more than that. That’s how the Club of Future Female Electrical Engineers also known as COFFEE, came about. Being a support system for future generations of women who want to pursue electrical or computer engineering is our biggest motivation to keep improving COFFEE and building it to its fullest potential. We hope to create a larger, more comfortable community within a department and achieve our goal of retaining and encouraging more women to pursue male dominated fields.

– Aside from being involved with organizations, we also became engineering ambassadors. The Engineering Ambassador program allows us to represent the College of Engineering while developing leadership skills and furthering our personal and professional growth. There are many resources provided by the College of Engineering and UC Davis that allow students to succeed such as the Internship and Career Center, office hours, tutoring, study sessions, and that Diana Brian Engineering Student Design Center, which is a university’s primary manufacturing facility for students teams and research groups.

– The College of Engineering also has the Leadership in Engineering Advancement, Diversity and Retention program, whose mission is to recruit, retain, and graduate a diverse population of students from the College of Engineering. We’ve also had the opportunity to work on some cool projects during our time here. A few of these projects include building and programming, a robot to follow a sound source, designing a digame using combinational logic, a pong game on an LCD screen and one of our personal favorites, an interactive game queue that uses to say capacitive sense technology to create a competitive memory game, Four Face. We are so thankful for the new experiences and opportunities we receive within the College of Engineering and at UC Davis.

– [Ladies] Back over to you, Alex.

– Two cheers for Victoria and Vanessa. What a team you both make. I’m never gonna think of coffee the same way again, or engineering for that matter. I know that you’ll be building cool stuff and breaking barriers wherever you go. Thanks again, Victoria and Vanessa. Great job.