Student Spotlight: Elaina Cole Receives NCWIT Collegiate Award Honorable Mention

Congratulations to Elaina Cole, CS student ambassador and undergraduate researcher at CIRDLES, on receiving the National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT) Collegiate Award Honorable Mention for her research project, “Engineering an Open Source Coordinate System Converter.”  

The NCWIT Collegiate Award, sponsored by Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Qualcomm, honors the outstanding technical accomplishments of college women.  The award recognizes women’s technical contributions to projects that demonstrate a high level of creativity and potential societal impact.   

Cole received a $2,500 cash award, a framed certificate, and a trip to the 2016 NCWIT Summit this past May in Red Rock Canyon, Nevada.  The summit gathers hundreds of educators, entrepreneurs, corporate executives, and scientists to discuss research, ideas, and action items to increase the participation of women in computing.  

For information about receiving a degree in computing, visit compsci.cofc.ed

We are so proud of what our #CSatCofC students can achieve! Congrats @ecoli1996! #Repost — So sad to leave Red Rock and the amazing #ncwitsummit as a NCWIT Collegiate Award Honorable Mention for my research project as part of College of Charleston's Department of Computer Science's research lab CIRDLES (led by Dr. Jim Bowring #csatcofc), "Engineering an Open Source Coordinate System Converter" and thank you to the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University for helping fund the project!! The project in its current state can be found on my GitHub (github.com/ecoli1996) and all contributions and pull requests are welcome. Thank you to Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and Qualcomm for sponsoring the award and to the people from HPE, Qualcomm, Apple, Google, and Microsoft with whom I had engaging conversations. Also, of course thank you NCWIT for providing these opportunities to highlight technical women and advance diversity in the field. All of the winners and Change Leader Scholars I met are beyond intelligent, creative, ambitious, and compassionate. Here is a link to the award winners and their projects and how to apply for next year: https://www.aspirations.org/participate/collegiate-award . Also here is a link to the NCWIT Aspirations in Computing website which I encourage high school students, college students, graduate students, and educators to take a look at and consider joining or encouraging others to join: https://www.aspirations.org . Thank you to everyone who has helped me along the way as I pursue computer science! Could not have done this without you!!

A photo posted by Computer Science At CofC (@cs_cofc) on Jun 20, 2016 at 6:18am PDT