Start a Local ELA Chapter
If you are interested in starting an ELA student group on your campus, here is a resource written by ELA UT Austin Computer Science PhD student leader, Juan Sequeda. (http://www.juansequeda.com/ and pictured at the right)
For more information, contact Alice Fisher, EL Alliance program manager today at afisher@rice.edu.
Empowering Leadership Alliance at UTCS Report 2008
The
Department of Computer Sciences at the University of Texas at Austin
has several student organizations. To date, there exists an ACM chapter,
Women in Computer Sciences, Turing Honors, Electronic Game Developers,
etc. However there was not a student group that was oriented
specifically to minority students in this department. In Fall of 2007,
several minority students were offered the opportunity to attend the
Richard Tapia Conference, which then led to the initiative of starting a
student organization.
The purpose of Empowering Leadership
Alliance at the University of Texas at Austin, Department of Computer
Sciences (ELA@UTCS) is to provide opportunities for underrepresented
students in Computer Sciences to get involved in leadership, research,
networking with academic peers locally and nationally through outreach
and mentoring programs, social activities, faculty engagement, and
attendance at conferences.
In order to accomplish our goals, we
have devised several functions within ELA@UTCS, where there is an
officer that is the lead for each function. Firstly, networking between
our members is done through monthly meetings. Furthermore, we offer
monthly faculty lunches so members can meet professors, learn about
their research and opportunities. We also offer tutoring for several
different computer science courses, in association with other
organzations and departments at the university. In addition, we offer a
mentoring program where students can seek for advice from other senior
students. Additionally, we have been colaborating with the outreach
efforts of the department. Finally, we organize social events in order
to integrate the members of the group.
General Meetings
In
2008, we organized seven general meetings (February, March, April, May,
September, October and November). All the meetings would range from 15
to 25 students.
Faculty Lunches
The objective of the
Faculty lunches are to expose ELA members to the research opportunites
at UTCS. In 2008, we organized three of these lunches. The first lunch
was in a Computer Architecture and Operating Systems lunch held in
March. Professors Stephen Keckler, Michael Dahlin, Lorenzo Alvisi and
Emmett Witchel attended. The second faculty lunch was about AI and held
in April. Professors Benjamin Kuipers, Vladimir Lifschitz, Risto
Miikkulainen, Gordon Novak, Bruce Porter and Raymond Mooney attend this
lunch. In Fall 2008 we had a lunch about Computer Graphics and Human
Computer Interaction. Professor Chandrajit Bajaj from the CS department
and Professors Luis Revilla and Randolph Bias from the Information
School were part of the lunch. We are very thankful that the professors
are interested in this objective and have been willing to always attend
these lunches. The attendance of members are between 10 to 20.
Social Events
Every
general meeting was also a means to socialize between members. There is
always free food offered in these meetings. Additionally, in Fall 2008,
ELA@UTCS had a team representing us in the soccer tournament organized
by the university. We went to the playoffs.
Mentoring
At
the beginning of the year, we asked the students if they wanted to
become mentors and if they were looking for mentors. However, after
pairing students up, not everybody would follow up with each other. We
acknowledge that this is an aspect that we would like to further pursue
and see how we could encourge students to be more active in the
mentoring program
Outreach
Members of ELA@UTCS
participated in the STARS Alliance conference at Auburn University in
Alabama in August 2008. The conference was focused on promoting
diversity in computing fields. ELA@UTCS was given the task to create a
project that further interest in Computer Science. Our project was
implemented through mentoring of undergraduates and our Saturday morning
event "Breakfast Bytes". "Breakfast Bytes" is held monthly at the
university and middle school and high school students are invited to get
a feel for C.S. through interactive activities, as well as having the
opportunity to listen to a professor at the university speak about
various topics pertaining to Computer Science.
Plans for 2009
At
the end of 2008, we did a recap on everything that happened in the
year, and what we would do to make better. We realized that we were
lacking organization in the preparation of events. We also want to make
the mentoring program more encourging. Additionally, we want to offer
more social events for our members. Furthermore, we want to be able to
measure how our members are doing inside the Computer Science
Department, and how many students are getting interested in research. We
want to make ELA@UTCS a sustainble organization, and therefore we want
members to be interested in continuing this organization. We are
planning to hold elections of officers for the new academic calendar.
We have created our website (http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/ela/) where we can keep track of
all types of events. Additionally, we will have lists of internships and
scholarships that students should be aware of. We are already planning
to have faculty lunches every month (January - April). In addition, we
already have devised social events for every month.