Call me Madam President

I can't tell you all how proud I am to be a part of this group! Also what better time than now to announce that I will be @SBU_GWISE President for the 2019-2020 academic year! #WomenInSTEM #WomenInScience #WomenLeaders https://t.co/OakzXNzBYg

— Caitlyn Cardetti (@CaitlynCardetti) May 7, 2019

Okay, so I already announced it on Twitter but I am more than happy to say it again. I am really looking forward to being the president of  Graduate Women in Science and Engineering (GWiSE) at Stony Brook University for the 2019-2020 academic year!

I cannot express in words how excited I am for this opportunity! Over my three years here at SBU, I have really seen GWiSE grow. And the rest of campus has noticed it too. All our hard work (e-board and general members) has paid off and GWiSE received the Jerrold L. Stein Student Life Award from the Graduate School Organization for being an Outstanding Organization Award last month.

On that note, I wanted to reflect on how I got involved with GWiSE and where I hope GWiSE is headed.

My first year here, I was a "general member" and would occasionally show up to some of the social events including a bike repair night that had pizza and a brown bag lunch. You know, the typical grad student event where you attend because you're hungry and they are serving food where the price is right, aka free. But somehow I ended up at the end of the year town hall meeting where they were looking for people to join the following year's executive board (e-board). I will be honest, I mainly went because they were once again having free lunch and I had a spare moment - but something possessed me to last minute throw my hat in the ring to be more involved. Literally last minute, as they were packing up the submissions and I was like wait, let me fill one out quick...

Anyway, I ended up getting the role of managing the GWiSE Twitter which was fine by me because I love Twitter! (P.S. You better follow me @CaitlynCardetti). But as this past year progressed, opportunities for more responsibilities came up and I took more and more on (some I even just purely made up) including event planning, Facebook, creating/sending out the newsletters, starting a book club, co-founding the SBU Grad Moms group, etc. And we had some really awesome events, my two favorites being hosting Dr. Elaine DiMasi, a personal friend and the physicist who ran for Congress in our district discuss her experience in politics (watch a video of her talk here) and then the Women in STEM Research Showcase.

I was happy I was able to contribute at a higher level this past year as an e-board member and I believe I will be able to contribute even more as GWiSE President next year. My main mission as President will be sustainability. I believe we've really elevated our standing as a school club to a true, well recognized  organization and I want this high level to continue to be attainable long after the current active members are gone. So to do this I want to make sure we have well-written documentation of how to manage our different e-board roles, have regular meetings with the Dean of the Graduate School and create and maintain more relationships with other organizations and centers on campus. I'm also hoping to fight to get GWiSE a seat on the Graduate School Council because really they could use more student perspective on that panel and preferably a diverse one (right now there is one student on the panel).

But if I could only say one thing about being on the GWiSE e-board, it would be that it has given me an amazingly supportive group of friends, all of which started with just wanting a slice of free pizza.

Anyway, keep up with SBU GWiSE on our blog to learn about the other members of the GWiSE Executive Board. And of course, follow us on Facebook and Twitter since I will still be running that for the next month.

And if you're interested, I had mentioned GWiSE in this past blog post: Supporting Women (and other minorities) in STEM.