All-Female Hackathon Encourages Women Interested in STEM Careers
Female coders were encouraged to put their own self-doubt aside and to relentlessly pursue their education and dreams.
On a crisp autumn Saturday, 110 students arrived early to the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) campus center in Newark, New Jersey. They gathered to participate in the first-ever ALL-women 24-hour hackathon (where ADP was the diamond-level sponsor). There was a lot of excitement and anticipation in the air, both from the attendees and the Women in Computing Society organizers.
Don Weinstein, ADP Corporate Vice President and Chief Product and Technology Officer, kicked off the hackathon with a rousing keynote speech touting the importance of creating an inclusive work environment.
"I'm proud of ADP's ability to continue to innovate as we lead the way in supporting the global workforce. Our edge comes from including varied perspectives and talent as demonstrated through events like this one," Weinstein said. "We genuinely believe that diversity and inclusion will continue to fuel the future of work, and we remain committed to empowering a workforce that truly represents all walks of life."
Next up was Isabel Espina, Vice President of WorkMarket Product Development (WorkMarket is an ADP company). Isabel shared her inspiring journey through the obstacles she had to overcome as one of a small handful of female engineering college students in a male dominated field. Her experience is familiar and relatable to many women in the STEM field. Isabel described how ADP has supported her career, as a technologist and as a mother, and that helped her find balance between both worlds.
Seema Murthy and Foram Shah from ADP's enterprise architecture team conducted a very well-received hands-on workshop called Design Your Own API. The students found the material informative and immediately put their real-world coding skills to work in creating their projects. Lisa Schmidt from ADP's college recruiting team brought a lot of energy and enthusiasm as students visited with her to learn more about internship opportunities at our company.
The judges evaluated the projects and had the difficult task of choosing the top five teams. The top five teams presented their ideas, and each team's project was evaluated on the quality of the code, design appeal, functionality and creativity.
The first-place team, four NJIT computer science graduate students, created a Sign Language Alphabet Prediction Translator application. The application takes American sign language images, predicts what alphabet the image is depicting, and prints the predicted alphabet along with the confidence score. The use case and inspiration for the team was a fellow classmate who is deaf and mute. The team wanted to create an application for the specially-abled student to communicate more easily with professors and her classmates. This application would eliminate the need for a human translator to help the student make the technical language used in class understandable. The students used Google Cloud Platform's Auto ML API with Tensorflow and Python for coding. It was a very creative idea!
In addition to winning cool prizes, the first-place team was invited to visit the ADP office to learn about the next generation of award-winning ADP solutions and experience our workplace culture. At the close of the event, I encouraged ALL student participants to put their own self-doubt aside and to relentlessly pursue their education and dreams. I reminded them that they alone have the biggest impact on their own education and career.
Through this Hackathon sponsorship (and the ones we plan to sponsor in the future), and our significant partnership with Girls Who Code focused on closing the Gender Gap in tech, ADP demonstrates our commitment to promoting and supporting women in technology careers.
Learn more about internship and career opportunities at ADP.
The ADP team at the hackathon
Pictured top row, left to right: Lisa Schmidt, Sarojini Priya, Avni Shah, Cynthea Ryder, Isabel Espina, Don Weinstein and Stacey Avent. Bottom row, left to right: Foram Shah, Seema Murthy, Sonal Doshi and Vidya Buddha.
