Waters Wins $16,000 Scholarship To URI

Hannah Waters, a junior at Smithfield High School, was awarded a $4,000 per year, four-year scholarship to URI during the Tech Collective’s 12^th annual GRRL (Girls Reaching Remarkable Levels) Tech Interactive Technology Expo Sunday.

More than 470 female high school students and 60 educators from 31 Rhode Island area high schools and career and tech centers were welcomed to University of Rhode Island's Kingston campus yesterday for the expo.

Presented by Tech Collective, Rhode Island’s industry association for Information Technology and Bioscience, and hosted by the University of Rhode Island, GRRL Tech is an interactive technology expo offering female high school students an engaging look into dynamic and rewarding STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) opportunities. Through industry mentoring and hands-on workshops, GRRL Tech aims to raise awareness of the STEM industries and career pathways.

Students attended their choice of two out of 24 workshop offerings designed and conducted by female industry professionals and URI faculty. Workshops explored a variety of STEM fields, ranging from bioscience, animal science, and oceanography to engineering, physics, and computer science. High school faculty attended one workshop and one educators’ session. Workshops were held throughout the URI campus, including in the new Pharmacy and Center for Biotechnology & Life Sciences buildings. More than 60 female industry professionals and university volunteers participated in workshops and helped facilitate the day.

The morning’s Keynote Speaker was Ruthe Farmer, Director of Strategic Initiatives for the National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT). A non-profit community of more than 350 organizations, NCWIT works to provide statistics, research, best practices, and a national voice for the increased participation of girls and women in IT and computing. From her role and personal experience, Farmer emphasized that the need for girls in technology goes beyond just filling jobs:

“We need the contribution of girls’ technical minds in order to build the most innovative solutions to solve the global challenges we face as a society,” Farmer said. “Currently, the contributions of women are largely missing from technology and innovation, yet women make up more than half of the populations and workforce, make the bulk of consumer decisions, and are the primary educators of our children. It makes no sense to continue building a technical world with a team that isn’t reflective of the people it serves. We can only dream of the innovative solutions we’ll see when women are equally represented as designers and creators of technology.”

The afternoon closed with the announcement of three GRRL Tech 2013 Scholarship winners, including the one presented to Waters.  Awarding the scholarships – valued at $4,000 per year for four years – were URI’s Dr. Laura Beauvais, Vice Provost of Faculty Affairs and Dr. Dean Libutti, Vice Provost for Enrollment Management.

Scholarship winners were selected based on their essay submissions by the GRRL Tech Committee