Nicole Gunderson

Background in SWE:

I have been a member of SWE since my freshman year of undergrad at CU Boulder, where I was in the outreach committee. I joined GradSWE when I began my PhD in 2023 in the community outreach committee, and became the GradSWE director in 2025.

Describe a leadership experience that challenged you. What did you learn from it and how would it influence your work on the SWE executive board?

I currently lead both GradSWE and am a Co-Director of Partnerships at Nucleate PNW, a technology commercialization nonprofit helping students spin startups out of academic institutions. Both of these experiences have challenged my ability to balance partnerships and relationships with many individuals and organizations, maintaining a friendly working relationship while managing business expectations, deliverables, and partnered events. These experiences have granted me the ability to expand my communication, organization, and corporate relation skills. I have been able to collaborate with multiple organizations for SWE and manage these partnerships, including UW CoMotion, SEBA, and WE-LEAD, and maintain relationships with SWE alumni to host networking events. For Nucleate, these partnerships maintain a ~$100k annual budget from companies such as JP Morgan, Perkins Coie, AbSci, Deloitte, DLA Piper, the Washington Research Foundation, and more.

What is one change or new initiative you would like to implement in SWE next year and why?

My collaborators at UW CoMotion will be ready to begin the SWE x CoMotion startup work/study program after planning the program throughout 2025-2026: helping SWE students get positions in UW startups. This will give SWE students get work experience, exposure to novel technologies, and knowledge of how new technologies make it out of the lab into various applications. The students have the opportunity for course sponsorship.

What ideas do you have to increase member participation/retention and build stronger community within SWE?

I think we have the resources and knowledge necessary to expand our reach outside of our typical event style. I pitched to my committee that instead of holding workshops (such as the GradSWE applying to grad school workshop) in the standard after-school fashion, we take the workshop into classrooms where similar material is being taught. This gives a wider breadth of students the opportunity to be exposed to SWE as an organization, as well as the material we aim to share with students.

What challenges do you think women in engineering still face today, and how can SWE help address them at our university?

The issue which faces our community most prevalently is underrepresentation, exacerbated at each step by the leaky pipeline of women in engineering. At every stage of education and career progression, more and more women leave engineering. This happens due to a variety of issues: hostile work environments, a lack of support, not seeing a clear path for them in this field, a lack of representation, and more. I think GradSWE in particular plays an important role in helping female engineers find their place in their respective fields during a stage of career progression where female representation is at its lowest. It is crucial to connect our members to women who started where our members are at right now, and showing them that a path forward on their current career trajectory is not only possible, but favorable.

The SWE executive board works as a team to plan events and initiatives. How would you contribute to creating a positive and productive team environment?

As GradSWE president, I lead weekly meetings with my committee leads, aid them in planning 1-3 events per committee per quarter, introduce them to members of my network who have access to resources for their events, help acquire funding for their events, and provide suggestions for team management and event planning. I am accessible via our team Slack, and have always been happy to jump on a 1-1 call with my committee leads to help them resolve issues that face their committees.

If you could plan any SWE event with unlimited resources, what would it be?

I am a member of a few different organizations that host a fundraising auction/gala to mark the end of the year. It's a great opportunity to showcase the work their organizations do throughout the year, recruit new members, recruit new mentors, and fundraise for the following year. I think this could be in-reach for us with enough planning, and a more dedicated focus on professional relationships and partnering with external corporations.