Grad Cohort 2019
6-7 July 2019, IIT Delhi
CRA-W, an international computing body, has been organizing the Grad Cohort workshop since 2004 in the US for women graduate students in computing. In 2018 ACM-W India adapted their model for the workshop and started ACM India Grad Cohort for Indian women graduate students. The first event took place in IIT Bombay in July 2018.
This year IIT Delhi hosted the second ACM India Grad Cohort workshop. The main goal of this workshop was to reach out to Indian women graduate students in the field of computing. In this evolving social context of more and more women taking up Computer Science and CS research as a career, the talks, panels and interactive sessions were planned with a focus on the crucial aspects of women’s lives in computing careers.
The event was attended by around 60 women participants who came from approximately 20 different colleges and universities across India. Among these women around 55 students were pursuing their PhDs in areas of computing, while the rest were students pursuing their Master's degree.
We were fortunate to have 14 eminent women CS researchers from Indian academia and industry:
- Suparna Bhattacharya, Hewlett-Packard (Industry)
- Gargi Dasgupta, IBM Research (Delhi) (Industry)
- Minati De, IIT Delhi (Academia)
- Lipika Dey, TCS (Delhi) (Industry)
- Sujata Ghosh, ISI Chennai (Academia)
- Vini Kanvar, Synopsys (Industry)
- Nutan Limaye, IIT Bombay (Academia)
- Preeti Malakar, IIT Kanpur (Academia)
- Arpita Patra, IISc Bengaluru (Academia)
- Maya Ramanath, IIT Delhi (Academia)
- Uma Sawant, LinkedIn (Industry)
- Rijurekha Sen, IIT Delhi (Academia)
- Nandana Sengupta, IIT Delhi (Academia)
- Namita Sharma, Intel (Industry)
Speakers and Organizers of ACM India Grad Cohort
The program consisted of talks, panel discussions and interactive sessions.
The speakers talked about how they have chosen interesting research problems to work on over the years; how they persevered despite setbacks; how their research gradually evolved during their PhD years and after graduation in an academic or industrial setting; how they applied for jobs; how they chose between academic and industrial job offers; whether collaborations have been useful for their research and how they did the necessary networking; and whether they have faced challenges balancing work with family responsibilities.
The event was made possible by generous sponsorship from Google India, ACM India and the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, IIT Delhi.
Participants of ACM India Grad Cohort