EEECS Participates in Inaugural NI CyberFirst EmPower Girls Event
EEECS SWAN Co-Champion, Dr Ciara Rafferty, was one of the panellists at Northern Ireland's first CyberFirst EmPower Girls event on 30 April 2024 at Windsor Park and shares her experience of the day below.
On Tuesday 30 April 2024, Cyber First hosted 250 Year 8 girls in the National Football Stadium in Windsor Park in the first EmPower Girls NI event to inspire girls to consider careers in technology and cyber security. Northern Ireland has a strong technology and cyber security community, yet women represent just 23% of the technology sector today. This event is a great step towards addressing this startling statistic and encouraging women to consider this field of work. The importance of this event was underlined with the attendance of the First and Deputy First Ministers, Michelle O’Neill and Emma Little Pengelly, who spent time with the students and supported the event.
As part of the day, the girls got to take part in interactive displays from over 30 organisations, demo sessions and inspirational panels, to hear from several women working in cyber security and technology. Lots of swag was also given out on the day from all of the companies and organisations in attendance, and there were some fabulous, personal and inspiring keynotes speeches. The buzz from the pupils was great, with lots of smiling faces in front of the backdrop of the football pitch.
For the interactive demo session, our QUB staff brought along the Tilt Five Augmented Reality (AR) headsets and the girls loved the two player games, whilst displaying some of our student projects on AR and virtual reality. We also had VR headsets, with cyber security interactive training, which some of the students were keen to try and did so well. This training is regularly offered to our undergraduate students, designed by the QUB ACE-CSE team, led by Dr Sandra Scott Hayward, who champions cyber security education across the whole of the university. Cyber security is essential for all, not only for computer science students, and our EEECS staff and students help to share this message and training across the university and wider afield.
In the inspo session, the theme was “Dream big, start small” and a series of panellists answered questions posed by the girls. I loved being a part of one of the panels and answering some of the insightful and ambitious questions from the girls. Seeing the enthusiasm and curiosity gives me hope that the future is bright for our cyber security and technology community in Northern Ireland. I’m looking forward to seeing many of the pupils at Queen’s or other Universities study STEM subjects in the future.
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For further information on Athena SWAN at EEECS, please contact our SWAN champions Dr Ciara Rafferty and Dr Ayesha Khalid.