Engineering Community

WREN USIATYNSKI, a junior majoring in coastal engineering at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, recognizes the power and importance of community. To strengthen community among other women majoring in engineering, she helped start a chapter of the Society of Women Engineers (SWE) at UNCW. 

The global SWE is a not-for-profit educational and service organization that empowers women to succeed and progress in engineering and recognizes their contributions to the field.

After her freshman year, Usiatynski says high school friends told her about SWE chapters at their universities.

“After looking into it, I reached out to EMILY (WEBER) and asked if she would help create a Society of Women Engineers at UNCW,” she says. “Since then, we’ve built an executive board of a secretary, treasurer, webmaster, outreach coordinator, president, and vice president.” 

Weber, a coastal engineering major and the group’s vice president, readily accepted Usiatynski’s request to help establish the group.

She says the curriculum can be difficult. “It’s important to feel like you have a community to back you and help with the trying assignments and those really tough classes,” Weber says. “I think it’s really important to have a really solid support group, and that’s another thing our group is trying to foster.” 

Between ten to twenty students attend their events, but some draw a larger crowd. The group recently partnered with Engineering 101 students to hold a wave flume boat race. About 150 engineering students participated, and SWE hopes it will become an annual event. 

Whether it’s taking a field trip to a beach dredge and renourishment site or participating in outreach events like the Femme in STEM event at the Fort Fisher aquarium, UNCW’s SWE chapter offers a variety of opportunities to learn more about engineering and spread interest about it.  At group meetings, members discuss events and classes, have study sessions, listen to guest speakers, and build connections.

“The primary goal is to provide professional development through social connection in hopes of encouraging women to enter and stick with engineering as a field,” says Usiatynski, who is the group’s president. “I’m super grateful for the mutual support between women in my engineering cohort and the executive board.  We’re all in a bunch of classes together. I think having groups like this will spread the wealth, by creating an avenue for others to make that same connection and community.”

Usiatynski and Weber received funding from UNCW’s coastal engineering program to attend the national SWE conference in Chicago in October.

“I talked to incredible people from all over the world,” Usiatynski says. “As students of sort of a niche engineering discipline, it was cool to see the ways women have creatively used their degrees and applied them to a wide variety of topics and companies.” 

The conference’s career fair broadened their vision of where engineers can apply their skills. “It allowed me to see we’re needed everywhere,” Weber says. “Just about every company you can imagine was there recruiting engineers. It was pretty cool.”

At UNCW, Usiatynski says she wants to get more student members to the global conference and networking with professionals.

“What we’re looking at now is really getting the next generation of engineers, even if that’s just people a grade below us, interested in leadership and maybe one day running SWE and getting younger students involved and creating that community,” she says.  “We just want to provide professional development, connection, and encouragement to stick with engineering.”

To view more of photographer Madeline Gray’s work, go to madelinegrayphoto.com.

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