The World’s Most Active ACM Student Chapters Video Series

Episode 2: Cornell University ACM-W Student Chapter, USA

The representation of women and other underrepresented groups in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Medicine) fields has been a much debated topic throughout the tech industry and academia in recent times. With so much attention and effort made to improve representation within industry, student-led bodies are doing their part, if not more. One of these student organizations is WICC (Women In Computing At Cornell), whose core mission is to empower women to carve their own paths in the field of computer science.

WICC is one of the most recognized ACM-W Chapters in North America, and it works tirelessly toward its mission. Alongside some great individuals from their team,  over the past few months XRDS worked with WICC to find the best way to showcase their hardwork. Just as we featured the UPES ACM Student Chapter in our first video, we bring to you our second episode in the series, featuring the ACM-W chapter from Cornell University: WICC.

We hope you’ll enjoy seeing the video as much as we enjoyed making it! And please do visit their social media channels to learn more about them.

Top 3 Winning Articles of the “The Time is Write 2.0” Competition

Here are the three winners of our The Time is Write 2.0 competition! You can read the three articles below, but first: congrats to Dipika Rajesh, Aditi Balaji and Pratyush Singh.

The Time is Write is an article writing competition that encourages all the aspiring writers to lay out their thoughts in writin and to share them on a global platform. This year, participants had to write a short article on the topic “Your Dream Software: Revolutionize the future”, about what their idea of a perfect software might be in order to revolutionize a particular field.

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The World’s Most Active ACM Chapters Series in Video, Episode 1: UPES ACM Student Chapter, Uttarakhand, India

Working as Departments Chief for ACM XRDS Magazine over the past few years has put me in contact with talented individuals and interest groups ranging from California’s exuberant Silicon Valley to Indonesia’s remote tapestry of mountainous islands. During this process of dialogue and discovery, I was often humbled by my ever-growing awareness of the cultural and geographical diversity of the world’s Computer Science community, and how little I actually knew about Tech in other parts of the world.

“How is campus life in the Computer Science departments in Santiago, Chile?”

“Is Systems Programming taught better in Eastern Europe than in the US Midwest?”

“How much emphasis on Mathematics is there at HCI departments in Japan?”

“How do students organize departmental LAN parties to play Counter Strike in South Africa?”

“Which university has the best community for drone programming in India?”

There are all questions that my younger self could have never dreamed to crack. My horizon and preconceptions were constrained not only by my limited access to information and travel destinations, but also by my social sphere and the rigid official advertising facade put up by institutions in foreign lands and cultures.

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