By Vanessa Shehu, Staff Editor
Bryn Mawr College hosted SisterHacks 2.0, a hack-a-thon for Seven Sisters students on March 2 and 3 at the newly renovated Park Science Center. Bryn Mawr welcomed students from Bryn Mawr, Barnard, Wellesley, Vassar, Mount Holyoke, and Smith, a coalition of six of the oldest Historically Women’s Colleges in the United States. Computer science major Jocelyn Dunkley ‘20 founded SisterHacks in 2017 in order to create an organized platform for Seven Sisters students to collaborate, code, and innovate in the diverse fields of science and technology.
Dunkley, alongside co-organizer and fellow computer science major Kelly Dinh ’19, are proud of the growth that SisterHacks has seen in the year. During its first year, only a few teams competed, but this year, about 10 teams competed, and 65 percent of student participants came from outside of Bryn Mawr College.
Over a period of 24 hours, students created teams based on common interests such as gaming and recreation, social justice, etc. We were encouraged to branch outside of our own schools, and that could not have been better advice. As a first-time hacker and beginner coder, I was able to learn from and collaborate with students from so many different colleges. On my team of five, I was the only Bryn Mawr student.
When teams were not creating pitch decks and laying out maps for their apps and websites, we had the opportunity to network with alumnae and attend various workshops taught by prominent Bryn Mawr alumnae working in technology and computer software. The weekend started off with a warm welcome from Keynote Speaker Lynda Pak BMC ’90, Vice President of Strategic Business at Estee Lauder.
Open workshops included “Product Design Thinking Workshop” by Olivia Greene BMC ’11, a Digital Project Manager, and “Introduction to Git Workshop” by Eva Herzog BMC ’10, Software Engineer at Comcast. Participants also attended an “Alumnae in Tech Tea” which included Greene, Herzog, and Dr. Jessica Linker Wellesley ‘11, who is in charge of Bryn Mawr’s Digital Scholarship Fellowship.
Dr. Linker also allowed students to take a peek into a Virtual Reality project created by Bryn Mawr students during the fellowship. The Fellows’ most recent project was a virtual reality simulation of a 19th Century Lab in Dalton Hall, and the project’s purpose was to highlight the history of women in science at Bryn Mawr. It was a marvelous experience that captivated all of the participants.
The weekend culminated in an invigorating competition that allowed each of the participants to showcase their creative visions and skills in coding. Most importantly, participants were able to advocate for their passions and social causes of interest through their projects. One project was a Virtual Reality experience that simulates environmental changes in temperature and vegetation due to climate change. Another project created a database for internet users to track where their information goes during each internet search or website visit. This work is highly relevant in this digitalized age of increasing security concerns and blurred boundaries toward internet privacy.
As a first-time hacker and SisterHacks participant, I must relay the joy and empowerment that SisterHacks afforded to me as an aspiring STEM student. I got to learn from fellow women about the challenges of being a woman in male-dominated fields. I got to explore coding, which, as an aspiring chemist, has always been a foreign topic to me.
The most invigorating aspect of the weekend for me was that it gave me the opportunity to voice a story that has challenged me for a long time: my family’s personal struggles with the health care system in Philadelphia. My story starts with my grandfather, Sabri Cepele, who is an elderly immigrant in the United States, who has been in Philadelphia for 20 years now. Last summer, I searched for free and sliding-scale dental clinics that might accept his meager Medicaid plan and allow him to get his dentures fixed. I was faced with an abyss of innavigable information, empty answering machines, unclear insurance policies, and confusion. This is a hard reality for many Americans. With the help of my teammates, I was able to bring into fruition a website idea that has been at the back of my mind for a long time now. Getting the chance to advocate for people like my grandfather and present a project so dear to me was unforgettable. The goal of our website, InsureMe, is to provide a platform with centralized information about free and reduced cost resources and other related information. InsureMe is still a work in progress, as are all of the wonderful projects that were born at SisterHacks 2.0, and I cannot wait to see where it goes.
Image credit: SisterHacks
