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Bentley Students Receive Scholarships to attend Grace Hopper Celebration

The Grace Hopper Celebration is the world's largest gathering of women in computing, and since 2017, seventeen Bentley students have received highly sought-after scholarships to attend the event.
Bentley Students Receive Scholarships to attend Grace Hopper Celebration
Credit: anitab.org

The Grace Hopper Celebration (GHC), https://ghc.anitab.org/ is the world's largest gathering of women technologists, where women from around the world learn, network, and celebrate their achievements. https://ghc.anitab.org/about/our-history/.  It attracts between 20,000 to 30,000 attendees from industry and academia coming together from 80+ countries each year.

Since 2017, faculty members of the Computer Information Systems Department at Bentley have provided support for Bentley's female students who are interested in STEM related careers to attend the annual GHC conference to establish their professional networks. Many students who attended GHC found job or internship offers there because GHC is a big venue for big tech companies to recruit.

During the past five years, 17 Bentley students and a faculty member have won highly sought after GHC Scholarships by 2022, and many students were selected to be GHC Hoppers as the conference's volunteers. During that time, Bentley also sponsored an additional 30 Bentley students from the Bentley GHC Group to attend the conference, with funding from the Pulsifer Career Development Center, the Diversity and Inclusion Office, the Hoffman Center for Business Ethics, the Valente Center for Arts and Sciences, and the Graduate Student Association.

Ada Xama
Ada Xama (MS BA, 2023) received a scholarship to attend the Grace Hopper Celebration in September 2022. In her application, she wrote: "With my graduate studies in Business Analytics, attending the Celebration will be a large step toward effective integration of human judgment and computer automation, an essential aspect of sustainable technological use. I also am a Senior Graduate Ambassador and the Director of Outreach for the Bentley Analytics Society at Bentley University. As a Senior Ambassador, I speak directly to prospective students to help them with their program choices, Bentley's resources, practical skills, and student employment opportunities. As the Director of Outreach, I aim to connect Analytical professionals with Bentley students., My experience at GHC will have a huge impact during and after my studies on other Bentley students that I connect with daily."

If you are a female student who is interested in a STEM career, feel free to contact Prof. Haijing Hao (hhao@bentley.edu) or Prof. Monica Garfield (mgarfield@bentley.edu) at CIS department.