Motivation

The main goal of this workshop is to reach out to Indian women graduate students in the field of computing. The speakers are eminent women CS researchers from the Indian academia and industry, who themselves were in the shoes of the audience a few years to many decades back. In this evolving social context of more and more women taking up Computer Science and CS research as career, the talks, panels and interactive sessions will focus on the speakers' personal experiences.

How the speakers have chosen beautiful research problems over the years to work on, how they persevered over the solutions to those problems, 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, whether they have faced challenges balancing work with family responsibilities -- anything the speakers wish to share will be invaluable mentorship not only for women grad students in different years of PhD, but also for young academic/industrial professionals, just starting their careers and families.

More hands-on aspects of choosing PhD advisor, finding a research topic, honing reading and writing skills for literature survey in PhD, time management and building confidence etc. will be discussed. There will be ample opportunities over the course of the two days of one-on-one networking/discussions with senior researchers, both from industry and academia.